The old adage is that sports bring people together. Sports heal. When our country is faced with crises, we often turn to the symbolic healing power of sport to carry us through. To bring us together and help us forget.
This is not the time for that in Baltimore.
Riots have broken out in Baltimore over the last few days, stemming from anger over the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American man who suffered a spinal injury while in police custody after his arrest on April 12 and died seven days later. Six city police officers have been suspended pending an investigation into Gray’s death.
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Rioters are upset over the death of Freddie Gray, another African American man who died in the hands of police. How could they not be? But these riots are also about decades of neglect, abuse, violence and systemic poverty that has marked Baltimore since its mass middle-class exodus in the 1950s and 1960s.
It was Orioles COO John Angelos, the son of owner Peter Angelos, who explained this to Orioles fans in a long (and brilliant) Twitter message.
“My greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts,” Angelos wrote, “but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.”
That right there is it, right from the COO of the Orioles.
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This isn’t a time for baseball. It just isn’t. The Orioles are in the middle of a nine-game home stretch, and I don’t know if the rest of these games should be moved to Nationals Park or just canceled, but this isn’t the time for baseball in Baltimore.
This isn’t the time for distractions. This isn’t the time to come together and forget.
In Baltimore right now, American citizens are confronting the very sticky issue of what kind of nation this is, and what we want it to be. Baseball, at this moment in the process, has no part in that. This isn’t something that can be forced, or rushed.
EPA Photo
There will be a time for baseball, for sure. One day soon the riots will end and the Orioles will once again play in front of thousands of their fans, fans who simultaneously hate and love their city. That isn’t hypocrisy, or contradiction, either, but rather what it means to be an American in 2015.
The Orioles will be back. Soon. And some of these very rioters, the ones who marched in the streets of Baltimore on Monday night, will go to these games at Camden Yards, and they will cheer loud, and they will mean it.
