Baltimore City College baseball season falters amid buses, fields shortages

Baltimore City College’s baseball team had managed only four games by April 22, with canceled dates piling up because there were no buses, no available fields and no officials to work them. Coach Mike Miazga said the school’s own field was mostly unplayable, and he posted video of players using vacuums to clear it after rain.

The missed games put the Knights on the brink of losing their shot at the playoffs. Miazga said City College still needed 10 more games to reach the 14-game minimum required to qualify, a number that underscored how little margin remained after weeks of disruption.

Miazga said the problem was not isolated to one program. He said most Baltimore City schools had played only one or two games by that point, and he described the situation as an issue of inequity. In a system where Baltimore City Public Schools says interscholastic athletics are meant to build community, school morale, physical fitness and student growth, the basics needed to play a spring sport were often missing.

The strain showed up most clearly for players. Senior Jaden Randolph said the season was worse than the COVID-19 season, even though he was set to play college baseball the next year. For a senior class, the lost games meant less chance to compete, less time on the field and fewer opportunities to finish a high school career the way they had imagined.

The Baltimore City College case exposed how fragile public-school sports can become when transportation, field access and officiating are all short at once. Baltimore City Public Schools and the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association oversee the framework that is supposed to keep interscholastic sports moving, but the season at City College showed how quickly that framework breaks down when buses do not arrive, playable diamonds are scarce and officials are unavailable.

Miazga said he wanted more of his Black students to be excited about baseball, and he argued that the city could do more to maintain usable fields and expand access to the few diamonds that could actually host games. By the time the season was canceled, the team’s fight had become a larger Baltimore story about which students get a fair shot to play and which ones are left waiting on a bus, a field or an umpire that never shows.