The New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox played a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium last Thursday, a day after Major League Baseball postponed a game between the two clubs due to hazardous air quality conditions in New York City, a direct result of Canadian wildfires.

The famous Gotham city skyline resembled the color of the surface of Mars at times on Wednesday, with the air quality index (AGI) — a measuring tool that determines how much pollutants are in the air — reaching emergency levels throughout the northeast. A game between the Tigers and Phillies, at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, was postponed as well.

“These postponements were determined following conversations throughout the day with medical and weather experts and all of the impacted clubs regarding clearly hazardous air quality conditions in both cities," MLB said in a statement.

Three years after MLB and the Players Association agreed upon a truncated, 60-game season amid a worldwide pandemic — where clubs played games to empty stadiums the entire regular season, and players had to adhere to myriad health protocols — the league was faced with another another formidable challenge this past week, one with health, financial and civic implications tied to the decision-making process.

But Christopher Worsham, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Harvard Medical School and the co-author of the forthcoming book, "Random Acts of Medicine," said in an interview that not only was it right to postpone those MLB games, but that sports leagues and officials would be wise to prepare and anticipate these kinds of events in the future.

“I think it’s worth MLB and (the players’ union) to develop certain policies moving forward, because in the coming decades, with climate change, you’re likely to see more of these types of things happen. And more often. You want to have a plan,” said Worsham.

Worsham added that it is important to understand the dangers that poor air quality poses to individuals, especially those with asthma or preexisting cardiopulmonary conditions.

“The reason we have air quality index (AQI) numbers – we know on a continuous scale, the higher the AQI, which is a calculated number that factors several pollutants, the higher the risk it poses for a number of different health outcomes,” said Worsham. “Any AGI number greater than 100, you have to worry about sensitive groups.

“Patients with asthma are at a higher risk, because the poor air you are breathing in, the (pollution) particulates get down in the lungs and can trigger inflammation,” said Worsham. “Even baseball players, if there is a fraction of that population that has asthma, they will be sensitive to it.”

Baseball players or athletes who compete outdoors in these types of scenarios, Worsham said, increase their chances of exacerbating health-related problems. Worsham said with any kind of physical activity or exertion, breathing polluted air can cause everything from shortness of breath to lung irritation, depending upon how deep the particulate matter gets into your respiratory system.

Major League Baseball does not have any standard policy when it comes to addressing poor air quality conditions and when to postpone games, just as there was no immediate response when the pandemic was in its early stages in 2020.

Any such set rules or policies of that magnitude would need to be collectively bargained between the two sides. During the pandemic, players had the right to opt out of playing that 2020 season.