Gary Thorne’s eye settled on his friend Adam Jones, who was standing in the batter’s box at Camden Yards.

Nothing unusual there. Except the Orioles center fielder stared right back at Thorne and put a finger to his lips as if to say, “Shhh!”

It was then that the venerable announcer realized every person on the field could hear his call of the Orioles’ game against the Chicago White Sox.

The date was April 29, 2015, and no fans sat in the stands to drown out Thorne and his broadcast partner, Jim Palmer. Civil unrest had roiled Baltimore in the days after Freddie Gray’s death, and baseball carried on in unaccustomed silence.

“A little unnerving,” Thorne recalled recently, with the 10th anniversary of the game approaching.

Games played in empty stadiums or before minimal crowds would become more commonplace just five years later during the COVID pandemic. But on that April afternoon, there was no blueprint for going about your business in the eerie quiet as a city teetered on the brink.

“You hoped everything would be OK, but you couldn’t be sure.”

Broadcaster Gary Thorne

Even as the day unfolded, players, coaches, announcers and reporters sensed they were part of a deeply unusual happening. No amount of strangeness around a baseball game could approximate the pain and disorientation Baltimoreans felt as they grappled with the terrible events of that month. But many would remember that afternoon at Camden Yards as one snapshot of the city’s disquiet in the wake of Gray’s death.

“It was tense,” Thorne recalled. “You just didn’t have any knowledge on how this day was going to go. You hoped everything would be OK, but you couldn’t be sure.”

Seventeen days before Ubaldo Jiménez threw the first pitch at 2:06 p.m., Gray was arrested by Baltimore Police and, while in their custody, suffered the spinal cord injury that would lead to his death on April 19.

Four days before the Orioles faced the White Sox, authorities briefly locked down Camden Yards during the team’s 5-4 win over the Boston Red Sox as civil unrest erupted near the ballpark.

Two days before the no-fans game — the same Monday as Gray’s funeral — Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred personally sent the Orioles and White Sox home from their scheduled series opener as tensions escalated between police and protesters and fires consumed 15 buildings and 144 vehicles around the city.

White Sox players smelled the smoke as they departed for the downtown hotel where they’d be marooned for most of the next 48 hours. Reporters leaving the ballpark crossed paths with officers in heavy tactical gear who were using the parking lot as a staging area.

No one knew what would come next.

“We had just grown to love Baltimore so much,” said Orioles catcher Caleb Joseph, who lived in McHenry Row with his wife and young son. “A united Baltimore was a very strong Baltimore. We got to experience that in 2014. And it just made your heart sad to see unrest in the city.”

Club officials met in owner Peter Angelos’ law office Tuesday morning to devise a plan. That day’s game would also be postponed. A scheduled weekend series against the Rays would move to Florida. But they decided the best answer for public safety and for their own schedule would be to play Wednesday’s game with no one in the stands. At the time, baseball historians could find no precedent for that decision.

“I’ve been in all the talks, and everything’s been about the city of Baltimore and the safety of our fans,” manager Buck Showalter told The Baltimore Sun at the time.

Gray’s death and his city’s pain begat a sports oddity that attracted attention from around the globe. The New York Times and Time magazine dispatched correspondents to Camden Yards, as did the British daily The Guardian.

For Baltimore announcers and reporters more accustomed to calling games and writing stories from the ballpark, the question became how to balance business as usual with conveying unique sights and sounds that would not be accessible to patrons barred from entering.

“You couldn’t ignore the situation,” Thorne said. “As far as broadcasting the game itself, you’re going to do what you normally do. But you’re also going to recognize that not only are you in a different circumstance but so are the players. So there had to be discussion of: How do they feel? I just think you be honest. The story’s right there in front of you. People have some idea what’s going on, but you have to fill in the gaps. You treat what is; you don’t need to add anything to the circumstances.”

Dan Connolly had covered hundreds of Orioles home games for The Sun, none resembling this one.

“We all thought of it as a monumental thing,” he recalled of the press box, which was the most packed place in the stadium. “This was something we’d remember for all of our careers: We covered the ‘no-fans’ game. There was a bit of reverence to it.”

Players grasped for semblances of normalcy in this unsettling context, leading to a few lighter moments. Joseph signed phantom autographs for nonexistent fans as he made his way to the bullpen for pregame warmups.

He caught grief after the fact from observers who felt his mime routine conveyed a lack of respect for a solemn occasion. Joseph said he would not have done it if he had anticipated that reaction.

“I struggled with being known for that,” he said. “It was just me in my imagination. Had I known there were cameras, I would have shut it down.”

When White Sox leadoff hitter Adam Eaton reached the plate for the game’s first at-bat, he and Joseph looked at each other and laughed. Even in youth ball, they had never played for a crowd of zero.

“You know you’re entering history,” Joseph said.

The sounds of that afternoon — so much starker without the cacophony of a full seating bowl — seem to stick with those who were there even more than the sights or the emotions.

“Kind of like a backfield spring training B game,” Showalter reflected. “You could hear everything.”

There was no “Oh” from the stands as a recording of the national anthem played before the game. Joseph could hear Thorne call the setup of each pitch before the ball reached his catcher’s mitt. Every foul ball rattled around the stands like some cantankerous phantom.

Home plate umpire Jerry Layne was so startled by the volume of his first strike call that he immediately switched to a hushed tone.

Joseph can still hear the violent crack of his bat, echoing off all those empty seats, the first time he made contact.

“I felt like I hit it 200 mph,” he recalled, laughing. “It was probably about 85 mph, but I felt like I hit it to Mars.“

Connolly recalled a pop-up to the right side early in the game. He could hear White Sox first baseman José Abreu screaming, “I got it! I got it!” while Orioles first base coach Wayne Kirby shouted, “Run it out! Run it out!”

“I flashed back to Little League,” the longtime baseball writer said. “I had never, ever heard that before because of all the ambient sound. It was the oddest thing. … It was like you had atomic hearing or something.”

There were cheers, from dozens of fans who’d gathered to peer through the gates behind the center-field fence.

“Here were fans trying to watch through a peephole; it takes you back to the old Brooklyn Dodger days,” Thorne said. “It was kind of odd but kind of nice. It added to making it more of a ballgame.”

As weird as it all was, Showalter felt that, once his players settled into long-practiced baseball rhythms, the context became less ominous. He had talked to the Orioles about helping the city find a “new normal.”

“I kept telling them, ‘There are no sides,’” he recalled. “We just had to do what was right.”

They jumped to a lead on Chris Davis’ three-run home run in the bottom of the first. Jiménez, who’d endured rocky times in Baltimore, threw a tidy seven innings. The fiddles of John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” still signaled the seventh-inning stretch. AC/DC’s “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)” still serenaded Zack Britton’s march from the bullpen to finish off an 8-2 victory.

They did it all in two hours, three minutes — unheard of for that era of bloated game times.

Whatever modest salve baseball might provide, Showalter and his club’s top players knew they’d be asked before and after the game to speak on their city’s turmoil. That burden would fall disproportionately on Jones, not only a face of the team but one of the most prominent Black stars in baseball.

“I didn’t tell him what to say or not to say, but I did say, ‘Just understand that your words are going to carry a lot of weight,’” Showalter recalled.

Jones, who did not respond to interview requests for this article, chose empathy as his theme.

“I’m not far from these kids, so I understand all the things they are going through,” he told reporters before the game. “I say to the youth, your frustration is warranted. The actions, I don’t think are acceptable. If you come from where they come from, you understand, but ruining the community that you have to live in is never the answer. … This is their cry. This isn’t a cry that is acceptable, but this is their cry and, therefore, we have to understand it.”

Showalter’s moment came afterward, when a 25-year-old Baltimorean and website operator named Kendall Hilton — credentialed for the game but not the postgame news conference — asked: “Buck, I’m a resident from here. I grew up in, like, the neighborhoods that everything is happening. What advice would you give to the young Black males in the city?”

Showalter prided himself on preparing for every media encounter, but he did not have words composed for this scenario.

“Well, you know, I talk to people — a lot of times, you hear people try to weigh in on things that they really don’t know anything about,” he replied. “I tell guys all the time when they talk about — you know, I’ve never been Black, OK? So I don’t know. You know, I can’t put myself there. I’ve never been, you know, faced the challenges that they face, OK? So I understand the emotion, but I don’t, you know, I can’t — it’s a pet peeve of mine when somebody says, ‘Well, you know, I know what they’re feeling. Why don’t they do this? Why don’t somebody do that?’ You have never been Black, OK? So just slow down a little bit.”

The 58-year-old white Floridian’s answer did not flow smoothly, but there was something in his wrestling, his effort to understand, that resonated.

“It was genuine,” said Hilton, who’s still asked about the exchange a decade later. “He didn’t have to answer that question, but he gave the best response anyone could give at that moment.”

“It came from my dad years ago, saying unless you’ve walked somebody’s walk, be careful how you criticize them,” Showalter said. “I’m not going to tell a Black man how he should feel. All these people weigh in, but you ain’t walked their walk. That was it.”

The Orioles left for St. Petersburg, Florida, a few hours later. When they returned to Camden Yards in the second week of May, baseball felt routine again, though Baltimore had just begun to grapple with seeking justice for Gray’s death.

But the people in and around the White Sox game felt they had shared an experience that defied comparison, even if they wished it had never happened.

“There’s been 16,000-17,000 major leaguers and, to that point, only 50 of us could say we played a game with no fans,” Joseph said. “It was like playing a baseball game in a library.”

He said the pandemic games of 2020, with pumped-in crowd noise and cardboard cutouts of fans, didn’t equate.

As Thorne walked down from the broadcast booth to the postgame clubhouse, he retrieved an unclaimed foul ball from the stands. He asked Showalter to autograph it, because he knew he’d never be part of another day like it.

People still ask him about it. When the pandemic hit and calling games in empty ballparks became an unwanted norm, several announcers reached out for advice. Just do the game, he’d tell them, and make the circumstances part of your story.

“It’s the most unusual event I’ve ever broadcast,” Thorne said. “There’s no question about it.”