The absence of fans didn’t stop Cincin­nati Reds first base­man Joey Vot­to from receiv­ing an ova­tion after hit­ting a homer to put his team ahead for good.

All that applause Wednes­day came from the Reds grounds crew. When they haven’t been keep­ing Great Amer­i­ca Ball Park in tip-top shape, the groundskeep­ers have loud­ly cheered for the Reds from the stands.

Teams through­out the major leagues have found dif­fer­ent ways to main­tain inten­si­ty with­out the ben­e­fit of fans in the ball­park. The Mil­wau­kee Brew­ers have formed a makeshift band in the bullpen. When­ev­er Minnesota’s Ser­gio Romo leaves the bullpen to pitch, the oth­er Twins reliev­ers play maracas.

But the most notable exam­ple arguably involves the Cincin­nati grounds crew.

Vot­to, who gave the crew noise­mak­ers ear­li­er this sea­son, said the groundskeep­ers’ con­stant cheer­ing even caused an oppos­ing play­er to com­ment to him.

“He said, ‘I hate that group,’” Vot­to said. “And I thought, ‘That’s exact­ly what we want.’ That’s exact­ly what we want. We want the oppos­ing team to hate, to be annoyed by them. I think they don’t care in the least. They’ve car­ried us at times, where we need ener­gy, where we need, I don’t know, some­thing dif­fer­ent. They’ve made noise. They cheer. They talk mess. They’ve been fan­tas­tic all year.”

Some of the Reds even made sure to meet the groundskeep­ers and thank them Wednes­day after clos­ing their home sched­ule with a 6–1 vic­to­ry over the Brewers.

“I can say hav­ing the grounds crew in our cor­ner, I felt like was a dis­tinct advan­tage for us because no oth­er city had that,” Vot­to said. “No oth­er city had a group that was will­ing to make noise, make musi­cal noise, talk mess to the oppos­ing first-base coach and play­ers and sup­port the team.”

In fact, plen­ty of oth­er teams also fig­ured out how to ener­gize oth­er­wise emp­ty ball­parks. In most cas­es, it involved the play­ers tak­ing the respon­si­bil­i­ty upon themselves.

Brew­ers reliev­er Brent Suter has led Milwaukee’s bullpen band that cuts through the piped-in crowd noise at Miller Park. Suter and his team­mates dis­cov­ered they could use dif­fer­ent equip­ment to estab­lish a beat.

“We got a bat hit­ting one of those met­al chairs,” Suter said. “Then we have some mal­let that is used to break in gloves, and we are hit­ting it against the dum­my out there. And then some guys are using their feet to hit the garbage can. And oth­er guys are slap­ping the pads and all that. We got a lit­tle bullpen band out there. It’s pret­ty fun.”

Suter said the idea came dur­ing a stretch­ing exercise.

“We just said, ‘Hey, lis­ten, our ener­gy could be bet­ter so let’s turn it up a lit­tle bit. It can start out here in the bullpen. We can bring some ener­gy, bring some noise to the guys,’” Suter said.

The Twins have their own musi­cal rou­tine every time the song “El Mechon” plays to sig­nal that Romo is enter­ing the game.

“It’s fun,” Twins reliev­er Trevor May said. “I just had the idea in sum­mer camp just because he actu­al­ly inspired me. He was yelling dur­ing our intrasquad games and he’s all you can hear. It was like, ‘We can do any­thing out here. It doesn’t mat­ter.’ I ordered some mara­cas on Ama­zon. We only play it when his song comes on. Peo­ple ask us why we don’t take them on the road. They don’t play his song when he runs out there. It’s awk­ward when there’s no ‘Mechon’ playing.”

The Twins have even found a stor­age space in the bullpen for the maracas.

“There’s a tarp hang­ing there,” May said. “We cre­at­ed a lit­tle pock­et. We just put them in there.”

These actions haven’t received uni­ver­sal praise.

Detroit Tigers inter­im man­ag­er Lloyd McClen­don was still the Tigers’ bench coach ear­li­er this month when he dis­cussed the impor­tance of play­ers cre­at­ing their own ener­gy but added a caveat.

“Some of the stuff that’s going on in base­ball, I don’t like it, the drum­ming, the bang­ing,” McClen­don said. “Par­tic­u­lar­ly with all the prob­lems we’ve had in the past, I just don’t think it’s appropriate.”

McClen­don didn’t spec­i­fy what past prob­lems he was ref­er­enc­ing, but the biggest sto­ry of the most recent off­sea­son involved the 2017 Hous­ton Astros’ sign-steal­ing that includ­ed bang­ing on a trash can.

With­out fans in the stands, teams have need­ed to get cre­ative as they seek the ener­gy required to get through the grind of even this pan­dem­ic-short­ened, 60-game sea­son. Reds man­ag­er David Bell believes his team’s grounds crew has made a dif­fer­ence as his team chas­es its first play­off berth since 2013.

“Very, very much appre­ci­at­ed,” Bell said. “I’m sure it equaled a cou­ple of wins along the way, and we know how impor­tant those are.”

AP Sports Writ­ers Dave Camp­bell in Min­neapo­lis and Joe Kay in Cincin­nati con­tributed to this report.