I watched the opening night baseball game between the Yankees and the Nationals. There was no crowd noise and there were no silly cardboard cutouts of people in the stands. I liked it. There was just something so eerie and cool about a game played in silence. I'd prefer silence to phony fans and crowd noises. I think it's the novelty of the whole thing and it just seems to fit perfectly with how screwy things are in the world right now.
Believe me, about halfway through the second game (or if you can stand it that long, maybe the third) the novelty of hearing all the players, refs and sounds of the game with no other noise in the background wears off remarkably quickly...
At first the AFL commentators were talking about how remarkable it was to be able to hear everything because it was new, until someone realized that the viewing audience were switching off en masse because there was absolutely zero atmosphere and it all seemed like a practice game. Even the most amateur games here have some crowd and external noise, it was just too strange for a TV broadcast of what is supposed to be the most professional, multi billion dollar sport in the nation. They tried hard to polish a turd no one was buying into, and about two weeks in the canned crowd noise started appearing in the TV coverage to make it more watchable.
It's interesting to hear/see the NFL is feeding fake crowd noise in the stadiums too which is different to here - it certainly goes part of the way to explain why Cam Newton was still being a FIGJAM to an imaginary crowd during the last game against us.