CLEVELAND – Confused birds will start chirping. Drivers caught in a huge traffic jam will stop honking. The temperature will drop. Hitters throwing batting practice at Progressive Field will pause for a cosmic intermission.
At 3:13 pm ET on April 8, the spring sky over downtown Cleveland will host a total solar eclipse, as the moon’s shadow stretches across the center of the country and eclipse hunters will race to locate the perfect spot for attend the show.
The orbits of the sun, Earth, and moon will align so that the moon blocks the entire disk of the sun, casting darkness along a path that will stretch from Mexico to Dallas to Little Rock to Indianapolis to Cleveland to Buffalo to Caribou , Maine. The phenomenon occurs every 18 to 24 months, but usually over vast oceans or uninhabited regions like Antarctica.
This one is headed for the spotlight, and it’s also on a collision course with the Cleveland Guardians’ home opener.
For two years, Cleveland officials have planned an event where the ensemble will perform to millions from front-row seats on the shore of Lake Erie. The showcase is expected to draw visitors to Cleveland from Canada, France, Ireland and Zimbabwe, as well as states near and far. The city will not find itself on the path of totality again until 2444.
To secure the Guardians an extension for ongoing ballpark renovations, the league booked them on a three-city, 11-day trip through Oakland, Seattle and Minneapolis to begin the regular season. They are one of three teams, along with the Boston Red Sox and Toronto Blue Jays, that follow that sequence, but they are the only one with heavenly complications.
The Guardians now face a decision: Will they host their home opener that day, or that night, or just after the three-minute, 49-second totality phase, when day masquerades as night?
“Everyone talks about where they were when the Cavs won the championship,” said Chris Hartenstine, education coordinator at NASA’s Glenn Research Center. “Everyone can say, ‘I was in the arena,’ ‘I was at the watch party,’ ‘I was watching with friends.’ This is one of those moments. It’s in science, not necessarily in sports. The nice thing about Guardians is that you can get a little of both. “I was there on opening day when the eclipse occurred.”
Preparation for April 8, 2024, for many, began on August 21, 2017, the date of the last total solar eclipse visible from the United States. That’s when Cleveland restaurant owner Sam McNulty first put a reminder on his phone’s calendar. He is now accelerating the completion of a rooftop bar at the Market Garden Brewery to accommodate out-of-towners who have reserved tables for April 8.
For some, it all started a little earlier.
“I’ve been thinking about 2024 since I was a kid,” said Mike Kentrianakis, who has witnessed 14 total solar eclipses since 1979 in Indonesia, Chile, Gabon, Australia, China, Russia, Greece, Aruba, Canada and – while on Sea of Scotland, north of the Antarctic peninsula.
He watched the 2017 eclipse from Carbondale, Illinois, and in late March he will hop into a rental car in Queens, New York, and begin his 15-hour journey to the same site, the rare city to fall into the path of totality in both 2017 and 2024.
“I will do anything for an eclipse,” Kentrianakis said.
Hartenstine anchored NASA’s public presentation from the path of totality seven years ago in a tent on the grassy area in front of the Capitol building in Jefferson City, Missouri. He wasn’t sure what to expect. Hartenstine went from sweating profusely in Jefferson City’s 90-degree summer heat to needing a sweatshirt. As darkness fell in the middle of the day, crickets, cicadas and birds chirped in confusion. Shadows intensified to what Hartenstine described as “video game” levels as the moon thwarted the sun’s effect, before everything returned to normal with disappointing speed.
“Four Minutes is a song on the radio,” Hartenstine said. “You can totally miss the experience. You have to know upfront what you’re looking for and then you can really embrace it.
While some 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. And, of course, the Guardians’ home opener — who, at least somehow, will have to surrender to the vagaries of science for a once-in-a-lifetime total eclipse at the park.
Over the past few months, the Guardians have consulted with everyone from local authorities to NASA scientists in an effort to determine the best approach for opening day. The Guardians have scheduled seven of their last eight home openers (to which fans were allowed) for 4:10 pm ET, but that time will fall in the partial eclipse window and they’ll try to throw a 90 mph slider while wearing filter glasses Solar power is a tall order. If they choose a late afternoon start time, fans could potentially view the eclipse from stadium seats that have a view of the midday sun. Even if they opt for a night game, there will still be traffic challenges to resolve.
Few baseball teams have had to consider such questions before, but there is at least one example – and they have become heavily involved in eclipse festivities.
In 2017, the Bowling Green Hot Rods, the Rays’ Low A affiliate, faced a similar dilemma. Bowling Green, Ky., lay in the path of totality, and when an astronomy professor at nearby Western Kentucky University put it on their radar a year in advance, the Hot Rods began their planning.
They settled for a first pitch scheduled for brunch, officially at 10:34 a.m., as league rules prohibited them from starting much earlier. The teams, dressed in black “moon” and white “sun” jerseys, cruised through the first eight innings, but just as the Hot Rods’ broadcaster expressed relief at the pace of play, the West Michigan Whitecaps put together a five-run ninth inning and the sunlight began to fade.

In 2017, the Bowling Green Hot Rods turned an eclipse into a fully themed event, with special uniforms and a show party. (Steve Roberts/Hot Rods of Bowling Green)
If the game had lasted longer than the required two hours and 38 minutes, the teams would have paused the action. Instead, moments after the final elimination, players and fans lay on the grass as professors explained the scientific development overhead.
The Hot Rods drew a crowd of 6,006, one of the largest in the stadium’s history and certainly the largest for a Monday morning first pitch.
The Guardians have sold out every home opener since 1994, and it’s fair to expect that Progressive Field will once again sell out its approximately 35,000 seats, eclipsed or not. In a normal year, this might qualify as a major event downtown; This year there is a lot of competition.
This is the first total solar eclipse over Cleveland since 1809, nearly a century before the city’s baseball team became a charter member of the American League. Destination Cleveland, an organization charged with bringing tourism to the city, estimates that 200,000 visitors will walk downtown that day. Most hotels in the city are already sold out.
“People will come to Cleveland like we’ve never seen,” said Scott Vollmer, vice president of education and exhibits for the Great Lakes Science Center.
NASA will broadcast the day’s events from outside the Great Lakes Science Center, where a crowd of 50,000 is expected to gather for the grand finale of a three-day festival at North Coast Harbor.
“It’s literally a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” Vollmer said, “and all you have to do is look up to see it.”
Downtown Cleveland isn’t the only place expecting to be flooded with eclipse tourists. The suburb of Avon Lake, Ohio, about a half-hour west of downtown Cleveland, sits directly on the centerline of totality, hence the city’s new slogan, “The Best Place in Totality.”
Erin Fach, Avon Lake’s director of parks and recreation, studied Hopkinsville, a small town in southwest Kentucky that welcomed visitors from 48 states for the 2017 eclipse. Fach and her team also dined at Ferrell’s, a Hopkinsville burger joint with one stove and a dozen bar stools that, five years after the historic event, still featured an Eclipse burger on its menu: a double cheeseburger with bacon and a sunny side up. egg.
Fach predicts the city’s population of 30,000 will double or triple on April 8. He prepared city planners by describing the day as their annual Fourth of July fireworks display coinciding with the largest high school football game they’ve ever hosted while another milestone event unfolds. at the primary community park.
Now eclipse organizers and tourists simply hope that the weather holds out and everyone can see the spectacle. Cloud cover is a concern in Cleveland, but Hartenstine expressed cautious optimism that Lake Erie’s temperature will create a barrier of cold air that will push a stagnant, cloudy sky away from the shoreline. Colleagues at the Johnson Space Center in Houston asked Hartenstine why eclipse hunters would venture to Cleveland on April 8 instead of Dallas or another city with a more accommodating spring forecast. Hartenstine pointed out that Cleveland has had clear skies on that date for the past two years.
“The pinnacle (is) totality,” Hartenstine said. “The last glimmer of the sun disappears behind the moon and then you have to take off your eclipse glasses otherwise you won’t see anything. When you take off your glasses, you can see the corona of the sun radiating into the sky.
“That was the moment for me in 2017. I still don’t get it. But once you take off the glasses and see the show, it becomes the time you have in that path of totality, whether it’s 20 seconds, or 3 minutes, 50 seconds, like Cleveland did. You have to embrace it.
“It’s four minutes of visual phenomenon, awe – and then it’s gone.”
The Guardians are expected to decide the start time in the coming weeks. Whether they build the eclipse into the home opener or try to work around it, it will be a baseball experience with few precedents.
Kentrianakis plans to wait until 18 to 24 hours before the culmination of the event to determine whether he will stay in Carbondale or go to Cleveland. The city with the clearest predictions will win. It is the last total solar eclipse that will be visible in the contiguous United States until August 2044.
“It’s an indescribable experience,” he said. “It’s unlike anything you could imagine.
“Everyone will say, ‘That was the coolest thing I ever saw.’”
(Top image: Eamonn Dalton / Atletico; Photo: Bill Ingalls courtesy of NASA; Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)