And as television play-by-play man Gary Thorne's call ("Goodbye! Home run!") rattled around the park, Davis's home run ball landed on Eutaw Street, normally buzzing with barbecue-eating patrons, rolled to a stop and stayed there, untouched.
What took place at Camden Yards Wednesday afternoon — a Major League Baseball game with no fans in the stands — had never occurred before, a 2-hour 3-minute moment of silence for the city. Baltimore's 8-2 victory was, by turns, eerie and amusing, comical and poignant. With their city hurting, the Orioles spent much of the time leading up to their first game in three days trying to grapple with the situation, trying to figure out their place in a community torn apart by widespread rioting following the death of an African American man who suffered injuries in an incident with police.
"We've seen good," Orioles center fielder Adam Jones said. "We've seen bad. We've seen ugly. . . . It's not an easy time right now for anybody. It doesn't matter what race you are. It's a tough time for the city of Baltimore."
The violence following the death of Freddie Gray, which ramped up Monday night, led the first two games of this series to be postponed, and with a 10 p.m. curfew through early next week, Wednesday's game was moved five hours earlier than its scheduled 7:05 p.m. start. The decision to keep fans out was reached because Orioles officials did not want to draw law enforcement resources away from other areas of the city. A scheduled weekend series against the Tampa Bay Rays has been moved to St. Petersburg, Florida.
"Obviously, it's uncharted territory," Orioles Manager Buck Showalter said. "Nobody's got experience at it."
So the pregame discussion ranged from the grave to the trivial.
Wednesday's game counted in the standings, and baseball players are above all else creatures of habit. So they wondered about the little things, too. Would they have to watch what they say to umpires because there would be no din behind which to hide? Would the scoreboard show replays?
"Is there going to be a national anthem today because there's nobody there?" Joseph said. "Is there going to be walk-up music for us in Tampa?"
Indeed, the center field scoreboard posted the statistics of the player who stood at the plate. The Orioles lined up neatly on the field while a canned version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" pumped through the speakers. They played music between innings, music for the Orioles as they walked to the plate. And when Baltimore right-hander Ubaldo Jimenez unfurled the game's first pitch — a strike to White Sox center fielder Adam Eaton — the pop into Joseph's glove seemed to echo.
There was baseball. But no normalcy.
"Like a ghost town," relief pitcher Zach Britton said, "but you're playing baseball."
In the hours leading up to that uncertainty, Jones, the Orioles' most prominent African-American player, spoke passionately to a packed news conference. Having grown up in inner city San Diego, he has long said he relates to the young people in Baltimore's toughest neighborhoods. Over the past several days, he said he listened to Baltimoreans on the front lines of the protests, struggling with the violence.
"I've said to the youth, 'Your frustration is warranted. It's understandable, understood,'" Jones said. "The actions, I don't think, are acceptable. But if you have come from where they come from, you understand.
"But I just think that ruining the community that you have to live in is never the answer, due to the fact that you're going to have to wake up in three or four days and just go right back to those convenience stores, go right back to all those stores. I think that this is their cry. And obviously, this isn't a cry that is acceptable, but this is their cry. And therefore we have to understand it. They need hugs. They need love. They need support."
Any support the Orioles could offer Wednesday had to come from arm's length. The bars across the street from the park were unusually sparse in the hours before a game. Fans lined balconies of the hotel beyond left-center field, where a "Go Orioles" banner hung. The fans who gathered outside the gates and stayed from first pitch to last, "They were heard," Showalter said.
"I get that symbolically we have to have the game," said Brad Hucheson, 40, wearing an Orioles hat. "And I get that, you know, the liability thing: We don't want people in harm's way. But it seems like a weird way to cut the baby in half. That feels odd."
"Odd," maybe, was the best way to describe it. Wednesday was odd. What awaits the Orioles over the weekend — "home" games more than 900 miles south of home — will be odd. But to a man, the players were careful about logistical complaints.
"To say that something we're gonna go through on a baseball field playing in the big leagues is difficult is really insensitive to everything else that's going on," Showalter said. "It's a small thing, for us, comparatively speaking."
So they dealt with it. Davis, when he received a ball for the last out of an inning, flipped it into the stands — normally a gift for a lucky kid, Wednesday a wayward ball that fell to the floor. Showalter said that when he called the bullpen from the dugout, he could hear the phone ring nearly 500 feet away. Joseph said as he was preparing to receive a pitch, he heard an internal announcement in the press box — the kind that never reaches the field over the buzz of the crowd — that Davis's home run was the 80th in the history of the park to land on Eutaw Street.
"I was like, 'Well, that's pretty interesting,'" Joseph said.
And then he caught the pitch.
In the middle of the seventh inning, the organ played "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," and there was no one to stretch. John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy," an Orioles tradition, came next, and no one sang along. An inning later, the press box announcer made the most obvious declaration of the day: "Today's paid attendance: Zero." And when the home team closed out an 8-2 victory, they were the only people around to offer each other congratulations.
They will leave for Tampa on Thursday evening, carrying their city, and its problems, with them.
"We have made quite a statement as a city, some good, some bad," Showalter said afterward. "But now let's get on with taking the statement we've made and creating a positive. We talked to the players: I want to be a rallying force for our city, and it doesn't mean necessarily playing good baseball. . . . There's some things I don't want to be normal. I don't. I want us to learn from some stuff that's gone on."
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Washington Post staff writer Clinton Yates contributed to this report.
