On Wednesday night, the only bright light for miles in San Juan, Puerto Rico came from Hiram Bithorn Stadium. There, the Minnesota Twins and the Cleveland Indians finished off a special two-game MLB series meant to honor the island where so many baseball stars have been born and raised.
Puerto Rico is currently recovering from a days-long outage that stripped power from practically the entire island. The outage is the latest setback in an effort to properly and permanently restore power across the commonwealth after Hurricane Maria devastated the area in September 2017.
Despite the darkness, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yuliz assured people on Wednesday that the evening’s game would go on, and that backup generators would be used to power the lights in the stadium if necessary.
“The game will GO ON,” she tweeted. “Nothing will stop us.”
And so, Hiram Bithorn Stadium shone bright into the night. It made for a spectacle that was both eerie and, given the thousands of cheering fans, a bit thrilling.
The game itself was pretty thrilling, as well. Several of Puerto Rico’s native sons, including the Twins’ Jose Berrios and Eddie Rosario, put on a show. Ironically, the event that took such an effort to put on ended up lasting far longer than normal. The tight contest went 16 innings and lasted a staggering five hours and 13 minutes. The Twins ended up prevailing, giving each team a win in the series.