When the Crowd Didn't Roar: How Baseball's Strangest Game Ever Gave a Broken City Hope by Kevin Cowherd (review)

America's national pastime has thrived for many years now, due in no small measure to the enthusiastic crowds that turn out for the games. The traditionally energetic presence of fans, however, was absent altogether in Baltimore one spring day in 2015 at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. The Orioles found themselves playing the Chicago White Sox that afternoon in a stadium without any spectators in attendance, and this unprecedented matchup in MLB history is the subject of longtime Baltimore Sun sports columnist Kevin Cowherd's gripping book When the Crowd Didn't Roar.

Cowherd describes the tragic and tumultuous events in Baltimore that brought about that unique game in the first place and left a powerful imprint on it. Those events began in the aftermath of the death of Freddie Gray, an African American resident of Baltimore. The twenty-five-year-old Gray had been arrested on April 12, 2015, on a charge of possessing a switchblade knife and he died a week later due to injuries incurred while in the custody of the city's police department. Over the next several days, an ever-growing number of Baltimore citizens protested against the alleged police brutality that led to Gray's death and also the inadequate public information being released about what happened to him following his arrest.

This widespread civic unrest in Baltimore only grew worse after Gray's funeral service on April 27. In various sections of Baltimore, massive throngs of rioters looted stores, smashed windows, lit fires, and destroyed police cars. These rioters also threw bottles and bricks at police officers, who responded to these physical threats with tear gas. It was a deeply troubling couple of days for both those who saw this turmoil in person on Baltimore's streets and the many individuals throughout the city who instead watched the destruction unfold either online or on TV.

Cowherd does an effective job in documenting this major flare-up within the city and conveying the pervasive, tough-to-shake-off sense of dread during that time. With all of these turbulent events avalanching within the city in the wake of Gray's tragic death, the Orioles had to make some urgent decisions with respect to their three-game homestand against the White Sox.

The Orioles did postpone the first two games until May. How to handle the third game was much more of a dilemma. First of all, the Orioles were constrained by a collective bargaining agreement with the players' union that placed limits on the number of days on which games could be rescheduled. In addition, there was not enough lead time to move that remaining game to Chicago instead. The Orioles' management ultimately decided that the April 29 game would still be held at Camden Yards, but in order to guarantee greater safety no spectators would be allowed into the stadium.

Cowherd does not treat that game as something extraneous; he instead adeptly and meaningfully integrates it into the broader context of the maelstrom that had engulfed Baltimore. A key approach he uses to accomplish this, and a strength of the book, entails highlighting several of the individuals involved with the game and how they each grappled with the extensive tumult in the neighborhoods surrounding Camden Yards.

Orioles All-Star center fielder Adam Jones is one such individual, perhaps the most compellingly amplified in the book. Jones, whom Cowherd calls "the face of the franchise and the city's most celebrated African-American athlete" (3), assesses with both large-minded empathy and palpable anguish what transpired in his adopted hometown. Jones struggles with and ultimately comes to terms with why it was necessary after all for that April 29 game to take place.

The actual game, which the Orioles won 8–2, is likewise superbly chronicled by Cowherd. He balances formidable quantities...