An Empty Oriole Stadium
It took a Seamheads.Com post by Terry Keshner this morning to get me back in the saddle. I really miss posting, but have a lot on my plate for at least another week and my favorite thing to do has had to take a backseat.
Seamheads is a great baseball site, one of my favorites, so I sat up and took notice when the Baltimore Orioles/Chicago White Sox games took center stage when the games were closed to the fans these past few days. “It had to be that way” the article said.
“It had to be that way”? When the Europeans closed their stadiums it was directly related to the players and the fans. They were getting killed on game day at those stadiums.
This didn’t have to be that way. What did the attempt of some high school kids and community organizers trying to usurp the authority of legally empowered law enforcement officers have to do with closing the stadium? Does the system need to be overhauled? Probably. But by closing the stadium they denied workers, vendors, and fans their legal rights so now you don’t just have the kids and their enablers affected you’re also affecting 40,000 individuals who had nothing to do with the mess.
Maybe the regular security measures that accompany most stadiums on game day, along with National Guardsmen strategically placed around the stadium, inside and out, might have been a better alternative. Just one suggestion. And I’m sure there are many others that are better than the decision to close the stadium on game day.
But this is something we’ve not had to deal with in our country before and hopefully it will be the last, but don’t count on it. The times-they-are-a-changing folks and now’s the time to get our smarts in order so that decisions for better strategies can be made in the future.
In my humble opinion, of course.
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