If you were around or followed the Minnesota Twins during the team’s first World Series championship in 1987, you undoubtedly remember the crowd noise in the Metrodome.
The noise was famously loud – so much so that ABC (the network that covered the 1987 World Series) compared the noise inside the Dome to the decibel level along a runway at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
Nearly 30 years later, and in the wake of an admission by the Atlanta Falcons’ owners that they used fake crowd noise, the announcer who called the series for ABC – Al Michaels – claims the Twins used fake crowd noise during the series.
Al Michaels said on PFT Live on @NBCSportsRadio that he first suspected hearing fake crowd noise during '87 World Series in Minnesota.
— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) February 4, 2015
“I’m going, wait a minute. This is a baseball game,” Michaels told NBC colleague Mike Florio on Pro Football Talk Live Wednesday. “Nobody is screaming like this when the fifth inning starts. … To me, there was no question” that the crowd noise was not natural.
It’s not a new accusation. For years opposing teams and sometimes reporters have claimed that sound at the Metrodome wasn’t natural – mostly at Vikings games.
Does Shaun King believe Vikings pumped in fake crowd noise when he played in Metrodome with Bucs? "Absolutely," he said on PFT Live.
— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) February 4, 2015
So was the roof the only thing inflated inside the dome? You can be the judge!
This embed is invalid
The truth about whether or not the Twins or Vikings piped sound into the Dome may have gone down with the building, but officials who ran the oft-noisy stadium aren’t changing their story.
The Pioneer Press found a 2013 interview with Bill Lester, the man who ran the Dome as the head of the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission.
“There were a few urban myths,” Lester said in the interview. “They didn’t pump anything extra in.”
