CLEVELAND — Confused birds will begin to chirp. Motorists stuck in endless traffic jams will stop honking. Temperatures will plummet. Sluggers taking batting practice at Progressive Field will pause for halftime.
On April 8 at 3:13 pm ET, a total solar eclipse will appear in the spring skies above downtown Cleveland, sending the moon’s shadow across the central United States as eclipse chasers scramble to find the best spot to view the spectacle.
The orbits of the Sun, Earth, and Moon will align so that the Moon blocks the entire disk of the Sun along the path from Mexico to Dallas to Little Rock to Indianapolis to Indianapolis to Cleveland to Buffalo to Caribou Path casts darkness, Maine. This phenomenon occurs every 18-24 months, but usually occurs in the vast ocean or in uninhabited areas such as Antarctica.
This game will be in the spotlight and will also clash with the Cleveland Guardians’ home opener.
For two years, Cleveland officials have been planning an event that would give the band a front-row seat millions of miles from the shores of Lake Erie. The display is expected to draw visitors to Cleveland from Canada, France, Ireland and Zimbabwe, as well as from near and far. The city won’t be in the path of totality again until 2444.
To allow the Guardians to extend ongoing stadium renovations, the league booked them an 11-day trip to Oakland, Seattle and Minneapolis to begin the regular season. They were one of three teams to follow that sequence, along with the Boston Red Sox and Toronto Blue Jays, but they were the only one to encounter celestial complications.
The Guardians now face a decision: Do they host their home opener that day, that night or shortly after the three minutes and 49 seconds of totality during the three minutes and 49 seconds of day that masquerades as night?
“Everyone talks about where they were when the Cavaliers won the championship,” said Chris Hartenstein, education coordinator at NASA’s Glenn Research Center. “Everyone can say, ‘I’m at the arena,’ ‘I’m at a watch party,’ ‘I’m watching with friends.'” This is one of them. This is a field of science, not necessarily sports. The cool thing about Guardians is that you can have both. “I was there when the eclipse happened on opening day.”
For many, preparations for April 8, 2024, begin on August 21, 2017, the date of the last total solar eclipse visible in the United States, according to Cleveland restaurateur Sam McNulty Sam McNulty entered a reminder on his phone calendar for the first time. Now, he’s speeding up the completion of the Market Garden Brewery’s rooftop bar to accommodate out-of-town patrons who have reserved tables for April 8.
For some people, it starts earlier.
“I’ve been thinking about 2024 since I was a kid,” Mike Kentrianakis said. Since 1979, he has witnessed 14 total solar eclipses in Indonesia, Chile, Gabon, Australia, China, Russia, Greece, Aruba, Canada, and over the Sea of Scotia – the northern part of the Antarctic Peninsula.
He watched the 2017 solar eclipse in Carbondale, Illinois, and in late March rented a car in Queens, New York, and embarked on a 15-hour hike to the same spot, a rare eclipse city in the United States. Overall path for 2017 and 2024.
“I would do anything for a solar eclipse,” Kentrianakis said.
Seven years ago, Hartenstein hosted a NASA public lecture on the path of totality in a tent on the lawn in front of the state Capitol in Jefferson City, Missouri. He wasn’t sure what to expect. Hartenstein went from sweating in the 90-degree summer heat in Jefferson City to needing a sweatshirt. At noon, darkness falls, and crickets, cicadas, and birds are chirping in confusion. As the moon blocks the sun’s influence, the shadows sharpen to what Hartenstein calls “video game” levels, and then everything returns to normal with disappointing speed.
“Four Minutes is a song on the radio,” Hartenstein said. “You might miss the experience entirely. You have to know what you’re looking for in advance before you can truly embrace it.”
While some people embrace it, others have to plan around it. The eclipse coincides with the NCAA Women’s Final Four at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse and the Cleveland International Film Festival at Playhouse Square. Of course, the Guardians’ home opener — at least to some degree — they’ll have to succumb to the weirdness of science to see a once-in-a-lifetime total solar eclipse in the park.
Over the past few months, the Guardians have consulted with everyone from local authorities to NASA scientists to try to determine the best way to approach the opening day. The Guardians have scheduled seven of their past eight home openers (where fans are allowed) for 4:10 p.m. ET, but that time will fall within a partial solar eclipse window and try to accommodate them while wearing solar filters. Gliding at 90 mph without glasses is a tall order. If they choose to start in the late afternoon, fans could potentially watch the eclipse from stadium seats with a view of the midday sun. Even if they choose to race at night, there will still be traffic-related challenges that need to be addressed.
Few baseball teams have had to consider such a question before, but in at least one instance they went all-in on a solar eclipse celebration.
In 2017, the Rays’ Low A affiliate, the Bowling Green Hot Rods, faced a similar dilemma. Bowling Green, Kentucky, lies in the path of a total solar eclipse, and the hot rodders began their plans when an astronomy professor at nearby Western Kentucky University put it on their radar a year in advance.
They decided to play their first game during brunch, with the official time being 10:34 a.m., because league rules prohibited them from starting games earlier. The team wearing black “Moon” and white “Sun” jerseys breezed through the first eight innings, but just as the Hot Rod announcer expressed relief at the pace of play, the Western Michigan Whitecaps put together a five-run third. After the ninth round, the sun began to dim.
In 2017, the Bowling Green Hot Rods turned the eclipse into a fully themed event, complete with special uniforms and watch parties. (Steve Roberts/Bowling Green Hot Rods)
If a game drags on for more than two hours and thirty-eight minutes, the team will call a timeout. Instead, shortly after the finale, players and fans lay sprawled on the outfield grass, listening to professors explain the science unfolding overhead.
The Hot Rods drew 6,006 spectators, one of the largest crowds in ballpark history and certainly the largest for a Monday morning first game.
The Guardians have sold out every home opener since 1994, and eclipsed or not, it stands to reason that Progressive Field will once again sell out its roughly 35,000 seats. In a normal year, this would probably be a big event downtown; this year, the competition is fierce.
It was Cleveland’s first total solar eclipse since 1809, nearly a century before the city’s baseball team became a founding member of the American League. Destination Cleveland, the organization responsible for bringing tourism to the city, estimates that 200,000 visitors will make the trek to downtown that day. Most hotels in the city are sold out.
“People are going to come to Cleveland in ways we’ve never seen before,” said Scott Vollmer, vice president of education and exhibitions at the Great Lakes Science Center.
NASA will broadcast the day’s events from outside the Great Lakes Science Center, where 50,000 spectators are expected to gather at the North Coast port for the finale of the three-day festival.
“It’s truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Vollmer said. “All you have to do is look up and see it.”
Downtown Cleveland isn’t the only place expected to be packed with eclipse tourists. The suburb of Avon Lake, Ohio, about a half-hour west of downtown Cleveland, is right on the center line of the total eclipse, so the town’s new slogan is “Best Spot for Whole Eclipse.”
Avon Lake Parks and Recreation Department Director Erin Fach studied Hopkinsville, a small town in southwestern Kentucky that hosted visitors from 48 states to watch the 2017 Solar eclipse of the year. Fahey and his team even dined at Ferrell’s, a burger joint in Hopkinsville with just one stove and a dozen bar stools that remains on its menu five years after the landmark event Japanese Eclipse Burger – a double cheeseburger with bacon and a sunny-side up pancake. Egg.
Fahey expects the town’s population of 30,000 to double or triple by April 8. He described the day as the annual Fourth of July fireworks display, coinciding with the largest high school football game they’ve ever hosted and another landmark event on the horizon, leaving the city’s planners to do Move in and ready at prime community park.
Now, organizers and eclipse visitors alike are just hoping the weather improves and everyone can see the show. Cloud cover is an issue in Cleveland, but Hartenstein expressed cautious optimism that Lake Erie temperatures will create a barrier of cold air that pushes stagnant, dull skies away from the waterfront. Colleagues at Johnson Space Center in Houston asked Hartenstein why eclipse chasers would venture to Cleveland on April 8 instead of Dallas or other cities with more relaxed spring forecasts. Hartenstein noted that this day has been sunny in Cleveland the past two years.
“The pinnacle is the whole,” Hartenstein said. “The last rays of sunlight disappear behind the moon, and then you have to take off your eclipse glasses or you won’t see anything. When you take off your glasses, you can see the sun’s corona radiating across the sky.
“That was the moment for me in 2017. I still don’t understand it. But once you take off your glasses and watch the show, no matter how long you stay on the overall path, it becomes different, whether it’s 20 seconds, It’s still 3 minutes, 50 seconds, just like Cleveland. You have to accept it.
“It was a visual phenomenon for four minutes, amazing – and then it was gone.”
The Guardians are expected to make a decision on starting time in the coming weeks. Whether they incorporate the eclipse into the home opener or try to work around it, this will be an unprecedented baseball experience.
Kentrianakis plans to wait until 18-24 hours before the climax of the game before deciding whether to stay in Carbondale or rush to Cleveland. The city with a clearer forecast will win. This will be the last total solar eclipse visible from the continental United States until August 2044.
“It was an indescribable experience,” he said. “This is not what you think.
“Everyone would say, ‘This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.'”
(Above: Eamonn Dalton / Competitor; Photo: Bill Ingalls via NASA; Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)
