Without the incessant 3-0 counts, a high school baseball game was played at Camden Yards on Wednesday. Nobody was there, so the actual sandlot sounds of the game -- dugout chatter, the tapping of gloves, foul balls crashing into empty seats and benches -- echoed throughout the park.
The novelty of the Orioles-White Sox game played in front of no one was out of necessity, but not because the entire city of Baltimore is aflame (it is not, despite repeated images of a local CVS pharmacy burning), but because of the high potentiality that another front in a war between two Americas risked being opened on national television, with sports at center stage.
Perhaps Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred was wrong to have the two teams play the game. Maybe they could have played another time, when emotions in Baltimore had cooled. Maybe church and community groups could have bused kids into the game or they could have played the game without selling alcohol. If the league was committed to playing the game under normal circumstances, however, Manfred was 100 percent correct to play it without fans, for sports, ostensibly the great healer, is revealing itself as the great divider when it comes to the racial and class issues that have returned protest to America.
How quickly the narratives change. A year ago, sports was a place of defiance and renewal, when a record number of entrants ran the Boston Marathon on the one-year anniversary of the deadly 2013 bombings.
Four months later, in August, when Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot Mike Brown dead, sports became a mirror into which America had for so long refused to look, a place where some of society's deepest divisions were reflected. Kenny Britt of the St. Louis Rams engaged with his teammates in a salute to Brown and other fallen black youth. Ferguson and the violence at the hands of the police was especially personal for black athletes, for so many know that by being in the wrong place at the wrong time and on the wrong day, they might have been Brown. Better than anyone else, those athletes know the immediate reflex by some to blame Brown's death on his petty theft and subsequent questionable decision-making is tempered by the hundreds of examples of harassment of black citizens who did not steal by police. To some cops, being black and poor from that particular neighborhood is the crime.
In response, the stitches holding together the fragile American cloth tore. The St. Louis police union shouted down Britt and the players, demanding an apology from them, and from the Rams for not punishing them. White fans attending Rams games collided with black protesters. Weeks later, white fans attending the St. Louis Cardinals playoff games chanted "Darren Wilson" as a counter to Ferguson protesters chanting "Black lives matter." Sports was not an ally, nor was it neutral to the cause.
When Eric Garner's death at the hands of the New York Police Department in July -- followed by a grand jury's December decision not to indict the officers involved -- fueled the "I can't breathe" protests, the New York Mets offered no moment of silence or acknowledgement of Garner's death, but on Opening Day held a pregame ceremony honoring two slain policemen, even though no connection was ever made linking the lone assailant to the protests, as the New York policeman's union asserted. Instead of lamenting the unfortunate deaths of three people, the Mets focused only on two, sending a message that only cops' lives mattered, and siding with the police over the widow of a troubled citizen killed at the hands of police. There was no healing, no reconciliation or recognition that everybody in New York had lost. The Mets, ostensibly the entire city's team, could have chosen not to get involved, given the emotional climate that was created by an officer choking Garner to death. Instead, the Mets sided with the police. The line is clear.
Imagine for a horrible moment the disastrous scenario of alcohol coursing for hours through the bloodstreams of people at Camden Yards. Imagine a significant portion of that crowd, which might already be largely unsympathetic to the Freddie Grays of the world, pouring into the streets by the thousands only to meet up with a black community protesting a senseless death by cop, and the marginalization and historical harassment of many in that community by the Baltimore Police Department. The Ferguson-Cardinals fans collisions were ugly but hardly noticed. If the Orioles-White Sox game had been played in front of a full stadium, the entire nation would have seen through sports what is abundantly clear: There is a conflict between fans and the poor and angry and displaced, a class war with both police and the better-off America isolated from them. It is a class conflict that has often masqueraded as only racial tension when the truth is that class as much as race is the source of their isolation and hopelessness, as well as the source of the aggression that too often erupts between them and the police.
Instead of providing diversion and city unity, over the past nine months, sports puts the poor in its place; few can afford to attend games. The increased glorification of police and the military manifests most clearly at sporting events, and the combination of that glorification contributes to a circumstance in which the National Guard and MRAP anti-minecraft vehicles are rolling down American streets, a militarized police dynamic that terrorizes black communities. The next sports team -- independent of the players -- that recognizes the black youths being killed by the state, also recognizing that this moment in time is shattering the already specious myth of post-racialism, will be the first. The sports machine siding with law enforcement only furthers the isolation. Police aren't only protecting property from the poor, but protecting the middle-class ticket-buyers from them as well.
Whether it is LeBron James or Carmelo Anthony, Ray Lewis or Kenny Britt or Adam Jones, it is incorrect to suggest that athletes have gotten involved. Black athletes have gotten involved. For whatever reason, whether through a lack of comfort, interest, or disagreement with what has occurred, white athletes have been largely quiet.
As intractable as the divisions appear, Orioles executive vice president John Angelos did what the Cardinals, Rams, and Mets did not: He actually listened, and through a series of tweets to an angry fan gave Baltimore's disenfranchised some respect and some dignity by having perspective, by connecting the economic, social and racial dots, and by actually giving the people in his city respect and humanity.
On Thursday, Orioles manager Buck Showalter did the same. The Orioles did not pander to the police, did not take sides. In a novel move, the team actually attempted to represent the totality of the city and how its challenges are devastating some of its communities, black and white. Angelos and Showalter recognized its hurt, aided in its healing, announcing in their own way that their black lives actually matter, too, that the city name includes them as well. It was an enormous gesture by Showalter and Angelos that only in this climate, where the poor are invisible until they erupt, might have seemed too much to ask.