PITTSBURGH — Most of the American sports over which we obsess have their own established rhythms, the times set metronomically into place for practice, for games, for training, even for soothing ourselves from a harsh world by talking sports in lieu of talking life.
No sport has more quotidian requirements along this paradigm than Major League Baseball, where the game's very respiration depends on keeping and sequencing these rhythms, so Thursday night's voluntary disruption, even on the game's margins, felt historic.
"In lieu of game coverage and in collaboration with the Tampa Bay Rays, we will be using our channels to offer facts about the impact of gun violence," the New York Yankees said on Twitter before their game in Tampa. "The devastating events that have taken place in Uvalde, Buffalo, and countless other communities across our nation are tragedies that are intolerable."
Perhaps sensing some need for further explanation, Yankees veep for communications Jason Zillo said, "There are things that are bigger than baseball."
For the official position of the New York Yankees to be, on a Thursday night in May, that some things are bigger than baseball ...
For Steve Kerr, the head coach of the Golden State Warriors, to tell you, during the NBA playoffs, that basketball questions don't matter ...
For Dave Roberts, manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, to sit in the visiting dugout at Nationals Park, barely a mile from the U.S. Capitol, and excoriate Congress ...
It almost feels as though the country has arrived at some new place.
Almost.
"I love this country as much as anyone," Roberts said, "but the people who are supposed to lead our country are supposed to take care of our walls first. That's both sides of the aisle. If you have Americans killing Americans. I just don't think they're doing the job they're called to do, to be quite frank. And we just can't be afraid to hold people to a higher standard of accountability."
Baseball is what has marked the time in America, as we learned from James Earl Jones' soliloquy in "Field of Dreams," but nothing is permanent. For the past quarter century, America's time has been kept just as accurately by slaughter. Columbine was 1999, Sandy Hook 2012, Marjory Stoneman Douglas 2018, Uvalde's Robb Elementary 2022.
From the year before Columbine through the year after Douglas, the country with the second-most mass shootings (four or more people killed), according to the New York Times, was France. France had eight. America had 101.
No wonder that Kerr, an eight-time NBA champion as a player and coach and an activist who's own father was shot dead while serving as president of American University in Beirut, felt the stinging absurdity of discussing Tuesday night's game against the Dallas Mavericks.
"Any basketball questions don't matter," Kerr said at a press conference. "In the last 10 days we've had elderly Black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, we've had Asian churchgoers killed in Southern California, and now we have children murdered at school. When ARE WE GONNA DO SOMETHING? I'm so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to devastated families. I'm so tired of moments of silence. Enough!
"Fifty senators in Washington are going to hold us hostage — do you realize that 90 percent of Americans regardless of political party want background checks, universal background checks? Ninety percent of us, and we are being held hostage by 50 senators in Washington who refuse to even put it to a vote despite what we, the American people, want. They won't vote on it because they want to HOLD ON TO THEIR OWN POWER! It's pathetic. I've had enough."
That's when Kerr got up and walked out. I don't know what the writers and broadcasters there thought, but I'll bet it wasn't anything like, "Well, yes, but I still need a quote about the importance of bench scoring in the postseason."
Kerr is one of the few people in sports with the gravitas to make that kind of statement, even though there are plenty of people, particularly in Washington, who'll tell you Kerr did nothing there but flaunt his First Amendment rights. They're some of the same people who make it so easy for others to flaunt their Second Amendment rights.
There have been 27 school shootings so far this year. As they say in baseball, we're on pace to hit 60. Guns are now the No. 1 cause of death for children in the United States.
This isn't the kind of hard truth we expect our baseball teams to be tweeting about or our basketball coaches to be talking about after a morning shootaround, but it's become a necessary part of the landscape in a country that's always between shootings.
