It was a first for professional baseball: a game with no fans. The Orioles-White Sox contest yesterday at Camden Yards could have come from a Mad Max movie. Two teams playing to an empty stadium, a few ragtag fans peering in from the outside, grasping iron bars that kept them from the verdant field inside. Major League Baseball decided to postpone two whole games in Baltimore due to the rioting gripping the city and the fact that fans at Saturday’s game were attacked by roving gangs of thugs. It then moved Wednesday’s game from the evening to the afternoon in the curfew-ridden city, and closed the stadium to the fans, before announcing that it was abandoning Baltimore altogether for the rest of the week, moving three Orioles home games to St. Petersburg, Florida.
The eerie silence magnified the sound of pitches and the bat hitting the ball. Tinny cheers from the dugouts greeted plays witnessed by empty seats. Players made light of it all by signing phantom autographs and bowing to imaginary cheers. It was like Field of Dreams come to a major American ballpark, or a post-apocalyptic game played by atomic survivors.
Most disturbingly, Wednesday’s game gave a brief preview of life in a failed state. When public order has collapsed to the point of not being able to ensure the safety of citizens, when a major metropolitan city is put on nighttime lock-down and schools are closed, then life struggles to retain its familiar forms, but is hollowed out. Boston experienced something similar in the days after the marathon bombing, when armored vehicles rolled through the streets, followed by black-uniformed SWAT teams, and citizens were told to stay indoors.
A bread-and-circuses approach would have been to keep the game at night, allow fans, and yet have an overwhelming paramilitary presence inside and outside the park. What happened instead, in its way, was worse, the acknowledgment of a (temporary) period of failed governance, and the odd, business-driven decision to continue with a game that no would see in person beyond those playing it.
Obviously, these were extraordinary circumstances, and this will not happen regularly. But it did happen, and it is entirely possible that it will happen again. Is it farfetched to think of similar events playing out in Detroit or Oakland, in Chicago or Boston? If we are entering a period where violent civil unrest is more common, then local governments that have failed to ensure the synergy of safety and opportunity will find themselves and local businesses increasingly resorting to such extreme measures. And, civic institutions will pretend for as long as possible that nothing has changed, while they adapt to a new world where disorder is common and our tenuous bonds of community fray ever further.