AQI Policy

D52 AIR QUALITY POLICY

While fall offers some of our best baseball weather, it's become increasingly common to have to deal with air quality issues due to nearby fires. Air quality issues are highly localized, so we will not be doing any blanket cancellation of games, outside of obvious extreme situations. Instead, we ask home team managers to consult the AQI readings and make game-day calls. If a game is going to be cancelled, the home team manager should notify the opposing manager by phone/text, and make sure umpires are notified.

The preferred source of data is: https://fire.airnow.gov. This is run by the EPA and includes a curated set of personal sensors (like "PurpleAir") using mappings appropriate for forest fires and to avoid misleading small fluxuations. However, most of the individual sensors are not maintained by professionals so one sensor with an outlying reading should probably be discarded.

If AQI is under 100 (Green/Good or Moderate/Yellow) games should be good to play.

If AQI is 101 - 150 (Orange/Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups), managers should expect to make a call at the field shortly before game time. In this range in particular we've seen radically different situations on different fields at the same time. 

An AQI over 150 (Red/Unhealthy, Purple/Very Unhealthy or Maroon/Hazardous) should result in a cancelled game.

As with rain, once the game starts it will be the umpires decision if the game should stop. Winds can change conditions fairly rapidly.

We encourage teams to use this same guidance for practices too.