The Texas Rangers played their first home game of the 2021 season on April 5th in front of a full house 40,300 in-person capacity crowd. The Rangers are the only Major League Baseball(MLB) team to open at 100% capacity this season, and are the first professional sports team in America to play in front of a capacity crowd since the beginning of the pandemic.

The Rangers are playing in a brand new stadium that hosted the 2020 NLCS and World series. The playoff games that occurred in Arlington, Texas, last year were the only baseball games of 2020 with people in the stands though very limited. Needless to say, the Rangers and Arlington have led professional sports in terms of experimenting with opening up sporting events to the public again. This move has caused a lot of public controversies, but so far there have not been any major outbreaks that we know of as a result of the full capacity stadium.

The Rangers being fully open seems like a dramatic jump compared to the 2020 MLB season that did not see any fans but all 30 teams in the MLB are having some sort of fan attendance even if it is limited, this includes our very own Seattle Mariners. The Rangers being fully open and every team in the league having some sort of in-person attendance no matter how limited is a good sign for the league as they move closer and closer to normalcy. 

The Rangers happen to be one of the worst teams in baseball talent-wise this year meaning they most likely will not be playing in the playoffs in October. The ballpark in Arlington, however, has started the charge towards full stadiums again, and has cleared the way for teams competing in the playoffs this year to most likely do it in front of a capacity crowd.