I do my best to not get into the doom-scrolling or doomsaying mode, though yesterday in America truly felt like some of the foundation simply melting courtesy of New York City flooding, and coming to a halt, and Texas making every citizen the arbiter of any woman’s body.
After seeing the U.S. Open have rain delays on a court that has a roof over it, given how bad the rain was in NYC last night, it’s hard to not have thoughts about what climate change will do to sports following these sorts of weather events in the immediate aftermath.
How many kids will not be able to play baseball in the summer because it’s just too hot to be outside for that long? Same goes for football in the late summer, and possibly longer down South.
We know hockey already has something of a struggle to bring in young players thanks to climate change. And that’s before we get into various facilities around the country being wrecked by hurricanes or wildfires or mudslides or floods or whatever else. It doesn’t seem like much now, but someone loses out there, and those will add up.
Certainly baseball, you feel, is in the crosshairs the most. While I’ve sworn off the Cubs, there basically wasn’t a day in August where I would have felt like sitting outside at Wrigley due to the swamp-ass humidity and heat we had even if I were interested. How much worse does that have to get before teams around the country see drops in attendance simply due to how unpleasant it is to be outside?
There’s probably dozens of things I can’t even conceive of that will happen in sports thanks to climate change. Which is the scary part. I sort of wonder if rain inside Armstrong Stadium last night won’t be something we look back on as an opening salvo.