Baseball cannot avoid conflicts. Games are played on Good Friday, the most solemn day on the Christian calendar. On Oct. 2, 1978, they played on Rosh Hashana, and Bucky Dent hit one into the screen at Fenway Park. Supply your own moral.

One year, baseball did get a message from on high. In 1986, the geniuses scheduled two Mets-Astros postseason games, for the night and next afternoon of Yom Kippur. Yours truly predicted a downpour of Biblical proportions, which in fact occurred, postponing the afternoon game. They got what they deserved.

Last year, the Tampa Bay Rays made it into the postseason for the first time, but a potential fifth and deciding game was scheduled for Yom Kippur.

“The way I run my life, there was no decision to be made,” the team owner, Stuart Sternberg, said the other day. He was prepared to attend services, but the Rays won in four games, on their sweet run to the World Series.

“We’re not going to be able to do this all the time,” Sternberg said the other day, acknowledging that baseball may accommodate Jewish fans in the Northeast but not Jewish fans in Chicago or Los Angeles.

For fans who may have to miss a game because of religious conflicts, Sternberg offered some advice, “It’s not the end of the world.”

There is only one word to add to that: Amen.

This article, “When Religion Is Involved, a Game Is Just That,” first appeared in The New York Times.