John Steverding fell in love with the Angels in the early 1980s, as a 10-year-old imitating Brian Downing's open batting stance. He purchased season tickets for the first time in 1995 and renewed them every year, watching almost every home game in person until the coronavirus pandemic kept fans away from ballparks in 2020. Steverding, a 48-year-old living in Yorba Linda, California, returned to Angel Stadium for the first time in more than 18 months on Opening Day. He walked a meandering path to reach the entrance, was assigned a seat four rows away from his usual spot -- Section 523, Row F, Seat 1 -- and longed for a physical ticket. It all felt so different.
"But then you walk in," Steverding said, "and you feel like you're home again."
Steverding greeted the same ushers he had been seeing for decades. He caught up with old friends who have become extended family members, heard the familiar voice of Michael Araujo introducing players and experienced all the sights, smells and sounds that harkened him back to a lost staple of his life. It made him realize how much he missed this -- a feeling shared by fans throughout the country as they made their way back into baseball stadiums over these past couple of weeks.
They all returned to a new reality. Where tickets are digital and transactions are cashless. Where directional signage, hand-sanitizing stations and plexiglass dividers are prevalent. Where food is pre-wrapped, condiments are provided in single-use packets and menus are accessed through QR codes. Where face masks are required, social distancing is mandated, bags are discouraged and many of Major League Baseball's long-held traditions -- tailgates, autographs, mascots getting up close with fans -- are missing.
But it's people gathering to watch live baseball -- at a time when we could use some commonality.
"Sports is a way a lot of us connect with each other," James Wells, another lifelong Angels fan, said. "And having lost that connection over the last year, I think, has impacted individuals and society more than we realize."
All 30 teams had fans in the stands to begin their home schedules and 23 of them limited capacity between 20% and 33% (the Texas Rangers began at full capacity and were the only team with a stadium more than half full for its home opener).
The Arizona Diamondbacks hosted 19,385 fans at Chase Field on Friday night, 393 days after the spread of COVID-19 originally postponed the baseball season. The D-backs' brain trust spent a startling portion of that 13-month period refining the blueprint that would ultimately allow fans to enter their retractable-roof ballpark during a pandemic, a plan that will continually evolve as the season progresses.
The D-backs went through more than 10 different versions of their health-and-safety protocols and wound up combining several of them. They gleaned ideas from the NHL's Phoenix Coyotes and the NBA's Phoenix Suns and took note of what worked in Cactus League games throughout the state, but they also borrowed from the way restaurants set up tables and the way grocery stores managed the flow of customers.
"We saw some venues that really did it successfully, where you got feedback from customers saying that they feel safe and confident and comfortable going there," D-backs president and CEO Derrick Hall said. "Because that's the key to all of this. We have to make sure that for the first visit in particular, fans feel comfortable enough knowing that we have their health, safety and cleanliness in mind, and they're gonna wanna come back. If you do it right the first time, chances are they're gonna continue to come back with a much more confident frame of mind."
The Seattle Mariners' home opener last Thursday, when 8,174 fans gathered inside T-Mobile Park, functioned as the first event in Washington with more than 400 people in more than a year. The Mariners aren't just a baseball team at the moment. They're leaders in their community's hopes for normalcy, a massive responsibility within a state that became ground zero for this country's coronavirus outbreak.
To plan for that, the Mariners sent staff members to the Super Bowl in Tampa, Florida, and the World Series in Arlington, Texas. There, they realized the importance of managing the social-distancing component and learned that their entire ballpark needs to open, regardless of capacity. In the weeks leading up to the regular season, they made it a point to over-communicate mask wearing through their social channels, hired some of their day-of-game staff as "safety ambassadors" and continually reminded themselves to remain flexible.
"We have a running joke around here of 'hashtag-nimble,'" Mariners senior vice president of ballpark events and operations Trevor Gooby said. "We think everything looks great on paper, and then you actually have it happen and you need to tweak some things."
The Angels, Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres -- three teams residing within 120 miles of one another in Southern California -- all felt that early on, with mobile-ordering apps that caused exceedingly long lines and left numerous requests unfulfilled. The Dodgers disabled their system early in Friday's home opener, which doubled as their World Series championship ring ceremony, and switched to traditional walk-up ordering with social-distancing mandates.
Rebekah Romero, a lifelong Dodgers fan who lives in Lawndale, California, slogged through long lines on Friday, then returned on Sunday and noticed far less congestion. Rebekah and her husband, Jorge, met through their network of Twitter friends and connected over a devotion to the team. They married on July 29, 2020, 28 months after their first date (the Freeway Series game when a pipe burst and flooded the Dodger Stadium warning track with sewage). Jorge wore a Clayton Kershaw jersey for the ceremony and Rebekah held blue-and-white flowers.
Friday marked their return to the place that binds them.
"The best word I can use is 'surreal' because I was like, 'Is this really happening?'" Rebekah said. "We've been waiting so long, just to get back to real life in general, but baseball for my husband and myself is our favorite thing. We met because of baseball."
The Dodgers' home opener was the first time their fans could experience the $100 million renovations that were originally planned for 2020. But several of the new amenities -- including Shake Shack, Sweet Chick and a couple of the new bars, including a speakeasy near their new center-field plaza -- were still closed. Soon, though, they'll all be open. The Dodgers hope to be at full capacity by the middle of June and CEO Stan Kasten expects to be "close to normal pretty soon."
Masks will probably remain a requirement throughout the summer, Kasten predicted, but some of the social-distancing protocols will continue to ease as case rates drop and vaccinations increase throughout L.A. County.
Other elements of the health-and-safety protocols will persist even beyond COVID, particularly cashless concessions and a dependence of technology for ticketing and parking. David Carter, a USC sports business professor who founded the Sports Business Group, cited the added layer of teams using that technology to extract more data from their customers.
"This may then allow teams and venues to better target fans for additional purchases," Carter wrote in an email. "Because this data is likely to be captured, analytics will be used to drive revenue. Sports fans, perhaps more so than other consumers, appear to be more willing to trade information for access, and this provides the sports industry with a long-term opportunity well beyond COVID's timeframe."
A reliance on cashless transactions and mobile ticketing also triggers concerns that teams might push away older and lower-income fans who don't have those resources readily available. Hall is conscious of that. Eventually, he said, the D-backs will assign specific concession stands that accept cash and perhaps install digital will call windows so fans can obtain tickets with some form of identification. The rest of the industry will have to make similar accommodations, but it won't change an inescapable reality -- that the coronavirus pandemic has altered the stadium experience forever.
Hall hopes one critical element returns to normal.
"Baseball's unique, where there has to be interaction between the players and the fans," he said. "Our players, we encourage them every year to go down the foul line before games and sign autographs, take photos, and it's something that kids look forward to and family members look forward to -- coming out early, watching batting practice, going down the line, getting in that front row. We've gotta get back to that. We've gotta get back to the point where that bubble is gone and the interaction and interface is back."