Baltimore's Empty Stadium Is Just the Beginning

On Wednesday afternoon, the Baltimore Orioles and Chicago White Sox played a game in an empty stadium. There's been loose talk that the teams, the league, and the sport of baseball were simple bystanders or even casualties of the protests and civil unrest in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, who suffered a severed spine while in police custody. This ignores a crucial fact: Camden Yards itself was a target of the first wave of protests last week.

Camden Yards was a strategic focal point—an iconic part of the city whose mere mention in news stories would garner attention—for the hundreds of protesters who gathered outside the stadium during the weekend. Some of the protests turned violent this week, prompting the cancellation of Monday and Tuesday's game and Wednesday's unprecedented empty stadium game—the first ever in Major League Baseball history. This weekend's scheduled games between the Orioles and the Tampa Bay Rays were also moved to St. Petersburg.

These protests outside of Camden Yards recalled the public gatherings outside of St. Louis Rams games and St. Louis Cardinals playoff games last year in response to the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Ferguson, Missouri resident Michael Brown, who was unarmed at the time. The fact that sporting events have become targets, or at least staging locations, of protests brings up a troubling question for leagues and teams: Just what role will sports play in a future where citizens continue to fight, sometimes violently, for their individual rights?

Has the growing commercialization of sports—the billion dollar television deals, the millions of taxpayer dollars used to publicly finance stadiums, and the hundred million dollar salaries—turned leagues, teams, and players from welcome distractions into the kinds of oppressive institutions that people rally against? Have sports leagues and teams so distanced themselves from their fans that they will become ever bigger targets of protests in the future?

The possibility poses a frightening prospect for sports organizations—all of which rely on public goodwill to sustain themselves. Unless sports organizations rethink how they engage with their fans and their communities, that goodwill may prove less than endless. Now more than ever, sports leagues and teams need to come up with ways to be more than just a product. They need to connect with their fans, become positive contributors to their host cities, and not imperious private entities ruling by the grace of a government-approved monopoly.

One can note the receding power of those institutions as city officials plead with oppressed residents to not damage their city, betraying their own social myopia. Oppressed people are oppressed precisely because they have no ownership or stake in a society that actively denies them their rights and blocks off pathways to a better life. Damaging your own city and damaging a city that you feel marginalized in are two different things.

Similarly, as ticket prices increase, concession stand items continue to be vastly overpriced, and television deals remain contingent on expensive cable packages, sports fans may soon also stop thinking of sports teams as their teams if they are not just priced out, but priced out so that teams can more readily serve their most wealthy customers.

We are not yet at a point where fans would turn against their sports teams, but we are closer to that possibility than ever before.

Sports have only played an ancillary part in public demonstrations in the past. Four Dodgers games were cancelled in 1992 as a result of rioting in downtown Los Angeles following the acquittal of the police officers who were captured on camera beating Rodney King. While areas around Dodger Stadium burned, the stadium itself was not a target of the rioting.

Rioting erupted in downtown Detroit in 1967 while the Tigers played a doubleheader against the Yankees at Tigers Stadium. Famously, after Detroit's 7-3 win in the second game, Tigers outfielder Willie Horton, a Detroit native, left the stadium in his uniform and went to a nearby street corner to plead with citizens to stop rioting. The image of Horton standing on top of a car trying to reason with angry protesters became a defining moment of the riots even though the protests did not stop that night. But even now, Horton, who works in the Tigers' front office, says he regularly gets stopped and thanked by residents for having cared so much about the city.

"People were worried and concerned about me being hurt while I was trying to bring peace," Horton told the Sporting News this week. "I saw hope there. A story to be told…But I told them this wasn't the way to do it. Don't loot. Don't destroy your neighborhood. This is your neighborhood. Your schools."

Tigers pitcher Mickey Lolich, a member of the Michigan Air National Guard, spent 15 days away from the team in season while serving as a bodyguard for the National Guard Major at police headquarters during the riots.

For many reasons, the actions taken by Horton, or even Lolich, would never happen today, nor probably should they. Athletes are too valuable to the teams they play for, they make too much money, and they are contracted to stay out of dangerous situations. Many of them, like Carmelo Anthony and Ray Lewis did this week, turn to social media to deliver messages of peace. While well intentioned, these messages continue to show a growing divide between players and fans. Sports stars are increasingly removed from the day-to-day lives of the people who watch them. They are not part of the community. They exist in a different social sphere, one defined by socioeconomic privilege that nearly the entire country cannot imagine.

All the while franchises continue to distance themselves from their communities while focusing on luxury box riches. While sports organizations may not be as ubiquitous or as disdained as the local CVS store or other chain retailer—which often gets attacked during protests as a symbolic strike against corporate greed—they may someday be seen as just as evil: the faceless economic tool of the elite, another cog in the system of oppression. In other words, the perfect target for an act of civil disobedience.