The schedule says the Chicago White Sox won't play again until Friday evening against the Royals, and while about 51 hours will pass between their last pitch and their next one, it's hard to say what the baseball landscape will look like by then.
Just as the White Sox wrapped up their victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates on Wednesday afternoon, the Milwaukee Bucks launched a wildcat strike, refusing to play their playoff game in the Orlando bubble as a way to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and the additional shootings of protestors. The other teams on the NBA's calendar followed, with LeBron James more vocal than anybody, and the league had no choice but to postpone the day's slate.
It bled over to other sports, including baseball. The Milwaukee Brewers joined the Bucks in solidarity, and the Cincinnati Reds agreed to postpone, rather than accept the forfeit. The Mariners, who have more African-Americans than any other team in the league with 11, voted not to play, and the San Diego Padres supported their motion. The Dodgers and Giants released a joint statement in their decision to not play Wednesday night in San Francisco.
The teams that played on did so awkwardly. Jason Heyward gave his Cubs teammates his blessing to take the field against the Tigers without him, but Anthony Rizzo expressed his frustration with expletives to reporters afterward. Matt Kemp and the rest of the Rockies took the similar, separate actions. Dexter Fowler sat out of Wednesday's Cardinals-Royals game, only joined by Jack Flaherty, who wasn't starting that day. Dominic Smith was the only New York Met to kneel during the national anthem, and afterward told the media through tears that, "I think the most difficult part is to see that people still don't care."
The Dodgers and Giants are supposed to play a doubleheader today to make up the lost game, but I wonder if it'll be as simple as skipping a day for a Los Angeles team when the Lakers and Clippers both voted to end the season, although the vote was described as a poll and not a formal motion. (The Los Angeles Angels were off Wednesday, with their game in Houston postponed by Hurricane Laura's fresh hell.)
This is a tough moment for leagues, teams and players to simply dip a toe in now, if only because they've already done that as a collective unit to little effect after the killing of George Floyd. Major League Baseball stenciled "BLM" into mounds for Opening Day, and the logos of their regular sponsors immediately afterward ...
... so every subsequent pause for solidarity or reflection or conversation becomes an increasingly rote acknowledgment. Like a half-staff flag on a non-holiday, it informs you that something tragic likely happened, but it's on you to know or care enough to fill in the blanks. This risk of numbness was a concern of some NBA players before they resumed play, and so it explains why they're taking more drastic action this time around. This chyron on the AP video of Smith's conference call tells you how hard everything is right now.
I'm not sure Major League Baseball teams will follow the NBA's lead step by step, given the vastly different demographics of its players and fans, but the NBA was the first sports league to shut down due to COVID-19, so it's previously played the canary in the coal mine for sports with regards to societal breakdowns. Jeff Passan and Ken Rosenthal wrote their assessments of baseball's current situation, but they can only offer educated guesses.
Assuming baseball as a whole tries to play through it, I'm preparing for a lack of coordination. There are 30 teams in the league, and only 7.8 percent of players are Black. Some teams are going to treat the protests against extrajudicial killings with more urgency than others based on their geography, their composition, their experience, and their leadership, both inside the clubhouse and upstairs. I'm not sure there's one right way to go about navigating this terrain, because it has to be felt, and that can't be forced.
Based on what we've seen from the nascent stages of this collective action, I think there's a wrong way to go about it, and that involves a teammate being joined by nobody else. That ultimately says "this isn't our problem," and I don't think that's true anymore.
(Photo by Nick Wosika/Icon Sportswire)
