I don’t know about you, but I am having a hard time getting excited about this truncated baseball season. Baseball has gone on for a century and half through many hardships in America, but never has life in America felt so precarious and sports so superfluous. With 141,000 Americans dead from Covid-19, to date, it makes sports seem pretty pointless by comparison. Sorry if this isn’t as peppy as you were looking for—if I were all gung-ho about this resumption, I’d be real sorry.
Maybe I will get into this at some point. If the Mets pick this year to finally win another championship (doubtful), I’ll be overjoyed (probably). Yet it will be bittersweet for whichever fan base gets to claim this year’s championship trophy. If the virus lets it get that far. Eventually, when (if?) we get back to normal and the 2020 season gets stacked next to all the other years in baseball history, it will be an anomaly, like the shortened 1918 season because of World War I, or the 1943-45 seasons featuring players not wanted in the military draft, or the 1981 season shortened by the first major strike, or the 1994 season halted by an even uglier strike, or the bizarre 1995 season that started late with sour feelings, or the end of the 2001 season, played in the very long shadow of the terrorist attacks on New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C.
Those seasons, however, did not have to be played without fans in the stands, like the Star Trek episode where the gladiators fight in a TV studio with fake sound effects. Those seasons included minor league baseball, which MLB already was maneuvering to cut significantly anyway—and now they can pretend the virus was the culprit for taking baseball away from many towns that have faithfully supported the game for decades. Forcing the designated hitter onto National League fans is another thing MLB bigwigs wanted for a long time. But to me, the biggest slap in the face is placing a runner on second with nobody out in each extra inning until someone wins. I have watched it for the past few years while working for a minor league team. I call it the David Byrne baserunner, in honor of the Talking Heads lead man: “Well, how did I get here?”
But the whole thing does not feel right. In a country where protecting others from getting sick is seen by some as a kind of political statement, watching a relief pitcher be forced to throw to three batters because that might somehow speed up a slow game, sounds more pathetic than entertaining.
But let’s play ball. Cue the invisible man on second. Pipe in the fake cheers.