PLENTY OF GOOD SEATS

By late Tuesday night, with a curfew in place, Baltimore was said to be stable. Maybe better times and healing are ahead. Maybe.

After Monday’s mayhem, Tuesday’s baseball game – like Monday night’s — between the Baltimore Orioles and Chicago White Sox was postponed. Wednesday’s game was moved to 2:05 p.m. with the mandate that the stadium be closed to the public for safety reasons.

Plenty of good seats aren’t available.

We’ll never know if Major League baseball did the right thing. It certainly did an odd, protective thing. A game with no fans? No vendors? Ah, the show must go on, even if no one is there to see it. The Orioles’ weekend series with the Tampa Bay Rays was another casualty, moved from Baltimore to Tampa. More home games surrendered, along with the city’s prestige.

MLB could have moved games to Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. It’s only 40 or so miles down I-95 and many fans live in the Maryland suburbs south of Baltimore. Hindsight is clearer than peering through the smoke of burning cars and buildings when making decisions about adding 20,000 or so folks to the streets of a city on the brink.

Sport has always been involved in social change. We need only remember Jackie Robinson integrating baseball, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising black-gloved fists at the 1968 Olympics, the NFL mandating interviews of minority candidates for coaching positions so often unavailable to them.

Bold moves inspire confidence. MLB’s did not. The silence of Orioles Park at Camden Yards for an afternoon baseball game will be weird and ominous and not at all a suggestion that Baltimore can rise above its serious and ingrained social and economic issues.
 
 
Post By: Larry Weisman, a longtime sportswriter for USA TODAY, blogs for Twistity.com. Follow him on Twitter @MrLarryWeisman .