Wednesday night’s Major League Baseball game between the Cleveland Indians and Minnesota Twins will be held as planned in San Juan, Puerto Rico, despite an island-wide power outage that will take between 24 and 36 hours to fix, officials there told the Associated Press.
San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz made the announcement on Twitter, adding that tower lights will be brought into the parking lot and that security will be increased around Hiram Bithorn Stadium. An MLB spokesman told the Pioneer Press that the stadium has a backup power source.
Puerto Rico’s electrical infrastructure was devastated by Hurricane Maria in September, and the island has had several large power outages since then. But the AP says Wednesday’s outage is the first to affect the entire island since the storm. Officials with Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority are investigating the cause, according to the AP, with NBC News reporting that an excavator hit a main power line. With 40,000 power customers still without normal electric service, the worry is that Puerto Rico’s power grid won’t be fully repaired by the time the Atlantic hurricane season begins June 1.
The first game of the two-game series between the Indians and Twins — the first meaningful MLB games in Puerto Rico since 2010 — was played Tuesday night, a 6-1 Indians victory punctuated by a fifth-inning home run by Puerto Rico native Francisco Lindor that sparked an emotional response from the crowd of 19,516.
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