There's little question the Orioles made the right decision when they postponed Monday night's game against the Chicago White Sox. There were indications that the rioting in Baltimore was moving toward Camden Yards.
Club officials, with the endorsement of new baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, acted properly to cancel the game and send fans home before they might encounter any danger, but there still is a human cost involved.
Hundreds of people work at and around the ballpark on game days and many of them depend on that part-time income to get by. Small businesses in the neighborhood also depend heavily on the increased traffic and revenue on days when the Orioles and Ravens are playing.
Sometimes, it's easy for newspaper columnists or radio/TV commentators to grandstand and call on teams to cancel games prematurely or to do so for some supposedly high-minded reason, but those decisions should always be based on pragmatism rather than principle.
I once ran afoul of most of my colleagues for criticizing some of them publicly for insisting that Major League Baseball call off the rest of the World Series after the 1989 earthquake that struck the San Francisco Bay area just as Game 3 of the World Series between the Giants and Oakland A's was getting underway at Candlestick Park.
Many of the sportswriters from outside of the Bay Area were shocked that the remaining games were not canceled out of respect for the people who died during that devastating natural disaster.
That might have made a lot of us out-of-towners feel all warm and fuzzy, but it would also have put a whole lot of people out of work for several days and cost businesses in both San Francisco and Oakland millions of dollars.
And, as local politicians and community leaders quickly pointed out, that lofty gesture would have robbed traumatized local residents of their Bay Bridge World Series at a time when they could use all the cheering up they could get.
I seriously doubt the Orioles will have to move any of this week's games out of town, but if they do, it will be for the right reasons ... and, sadly, because Baltimore is a broken city.