Players have indicated that they don’t like to play to an empty stadium. Yet social distancing likely will remain important once games start up again. One way to get people in seats would be to limit seating to safe distances. Here’s my seating chart to get a small crowd in to see ballgames. This would be a section twenty seats across, with the first eight rows.

Fans would sit in every other row and be staggered. The empty rows would not only provide separation, but would allow vendors to serve each fan without having food passed down the aisles. A 40,000 seat stadium might host 3,500 to 4,000 fans this way.

In addition, MLB could buy masks from Fanatic and give one to each fan entering the game as a souvenir. When dealing with exponential growth, any small percentage one could lower the rate of infection would be helpful.

It would be a bit surreal. There would be no roar of the crowd, but there would be applause, people standing up for a home run, people yelling, “Down in front,” as a joke. It might in fact be quite intimate, and the people who shared the experience would likely talk about it for the rest of their lives.