Anniversaries can seem arbitrary — it shouldn’t take a nice, round number to make anyone reflect on important events and the passage of time, but that’s usually how it works, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, 50 years ago Wednesday, is as important as it gets.
A small, but not insignificant, element of April 4, 1968, and its aftermath is how the sports world responded. Major League Baseball, from the start, was the outlier; opening day was scheduled three days later, on Monday, and commissioner William Eckert’s grand plan was to let each club decide how to proceed, rather than take control and do the right thing.