With a major American city being destroyed by floodwaters, with hundreds of thousands of people homeless, tens of thousands stranded in a lawless sewer, and corpses floating through the streets, baseball is irrelevant right now. There can be no enthusiasm for key games, like those between the Mets and Phillies, or for phenom pitchers like Seattle’s Felix Hernandez, when the place that gave the world Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Jelly Roll Morton is being erased, and while so many people are suffering without food, water, or shelter.

Baseball not only seems unimportant right now; the fact that games are even being played seems obscene. It’s unrealistic to expect play to stop – before it is anything else, baseball is a business – but one would hope, at the least, that the game could respond in a proportion appropriate to the nearly unprecedented scale of the disaster.

As of this writing, organized baseball’s entire response was the Pittsburgh Pirates’ offer to collect donations for the Red Cross over the weekend, which is a welcome but farcically inadequate gesture.

Four years ago, New Yorkers learned how much baseball can mean in a time of disaster. One suspects this is so not merely because it offers a temporary relief from worldly cares, but because the game is natively American, and democratic in its structure and its ideals of inclusiveness, self-reliance, and meritocracy. As much as jazz or the Marine Corps ethos, it is a living tradition that springs from the oldest parts of our culture and celebrates what the individual can achieve when he subordinates himself to a group dynamic.

In that light, it’s not surprising that New Orleans – that most American of cities, one that at its best not only tolerates but insists upon the pursuit of idiosyncratic and individual aims – has a long, rich baseball tradition dating back before the Civil War. The first games are believed to have been played in the city in 1859, just 13 years after the Knickerbockers lost to the New York Base Ball Club in what is regarded as the first recognizably modern ballgame, near present-day Louisiana Avenue, which is currently under several feet of water.

The same year, the first New Orleans team, the Lone Star Base Ball Club, was put together. In 1865, the Pelican Base Ball Club was organized, and it survived in various forms for almost a century. Along the way, New Orleans teams played in the Gulf Coast League, the Southern Association, the Texas League, and the Southern Negro League, among others. The Pelicans served as a farm club for the Indians, Red Sox, Pirates, and Dodgers before being moved to Arkansas in 1960. Baseball finally returned to New Orleans in 1993, when the Zephyrs, a Triple-A club then affiliated with the Astros and now affiliated with the Nationals, began playing at Privateer Park on the University of New Orleans campus, and then later at Zephyr Field, which opened in Metairie in 1998.

I was last in New Orleans for the 2003 winter meetings. At my hotel, a somewhat shady one just north of the business district that I’d picked so I’d have an excuse to get away from the drunken carryings-on in the French Quarter where the meetings were held, I got a lengthy harangue from the proprietor when I told her what I was in town for. The gist of it – and she was backed up by her employees – was that I ought to find the most powerful baseball man available and order him to get a major league team into the city.

There’s no mystery as to why New Orleans isn’t considered a major league town. The main reason is that it’s largely poor (and black). The second reason is that its physical isolation has prevented large suburbs from spreading out in all directions around it, meaning that as a media market it isn’t nearly as large as most cities of its size. The third reason is that the weather is, during baseball season, ridiculously horrible, with humidity so bad you can literally drink a gallon of water between the doorstep of your house and the corner and not even feel as if you’ve replaced what you’ve just sweated out.

For all that, baseball has an opportunity now to make a gesture worthy of its status as the national pastime. In Kansas City and Tampa Bay, cities that in their own ways are even more badly suited for baseball than New Orleans, there are crippled teams in desperate need of new ownership and a new fan base.

It will probably be years before New Orleans is ready to support a team, but in a time when the survival of the city as a major one seems in doubt, baseball couldn’t possibly send a stronger and more meaningful message to the people of southern Louisiana than it could by beginning a serious inquiry into how a team could be moved there.

If the people are defiant enough to move right back into their homes – and they will be – baseball can stomach being defiant enough to support them in the best way it can.