Tuesday 3.18: The Baseball One
Note: As promised, here’s the regularly scheduled newsletter. Early returns are positive.
Four-plus months into the pandemic and I’m no better at drinking the proper amount of water at home than I was when I first started working from my weird little desk back in March. I set a reminder on my phone, but the little pop-up’s ironic ubiquity means I don’t even notice it anymore. Dehydration is just sort of the norm. Hamilton was released on Disney+ and I can’t think of a more appropriate harbinger for The Second Wave than Mini Collapsible Umbrella (who seems like a perfectly nice and deserving guy)’s historical musical, which I have not seen because I’m not that into musicals and AP US History sucked.
The sports are returning. Japan’s NPB started playing baseball not too long ago (though my personal baseball interests remain with the somewhat surprising Kia Tigers of the KBO), and after a lot of waffling and some pretty embarrassing public negotiations between the players’ union and owners, Major League Baseball opened training camps this past week. It’s decidedly weird, anticlimactic, and probably pretty dangerous. Several players have already opted out on playing at all this season, which will be a 60-game sprint that will be more like a tournament than a true season. In a sport that loves numbers and quantifiable context, there’s no doubt that the 2020 World Series Champion (if they get that far) will forever have a pretty big asterisk next to its name.
The eventual 2019 WS Champion Washington Nationals, for example, were just starting to turn it around at game 60 last year, going 8-2 over a 10-game stretch to improve from 19-31 to 27-33, though still in 4th place in their division. They sucked and they wouldn’t make the playoffs in an abbreviated 60-game season as it’s drawn up now.
They’re also getting close to playing basketball in Disney World, which looks about as sad as you can expect it to look, and I’m pretty sure the NHL is set to begin their weird summer tournament in the coming weeks. As a fan of Boston sports, it’s been disappointing—the 2020 Boston Bruins were favorites to return to the Stanley Cup finals, and have one of the most exciting young teams in the game. Veterans like Zdeno Chara and Patrice Bergeron will only get so many more shots at the Cup, so it stinks to see those guys essentially lose a year. For the Celtics, who were legitimate contenders in the Eastern Conference, it’s equally disappointing, but more because they had the pluckiness and upstart mentality of a young team that has the energy to overachieve and maybe do something unexpected in a league where teams like the Golden State Warriors and Whoever’s Got Lebron are the de facto favorites in any given season (although I think Golden State sucks now).
What has not materialized, noticeably, is any real excitement. As a person who follows a strict facial-hair regimen dictated by the arrival of pitcher and catchers in the third week of February, when Spring Training typically begins, I had expected the return of batting practice and Fungo drills to awaken something in me, but watching distant views of Alex Verdugo facing Nathan Eovaldi on Twitter brings me nothing but sadness. The desperation of the league to recoup some of its alleged losses seems shameless, and the half-baked plan to return to something approximating baseball seems almost obscene at this point, as some players fall ill and others simply say they’re too scared to participate, citing concern for family members who may be immune-compromised.
The extent to which the league has shown its ass throughout this whole fiasco is staggering, and at its core, I think the most damning misjudgement on the part of owners was that what fans wanted to see and what makes the league money were one in the same—that high stakes and drama were what we were missing.
It’s become a popular theory that a second wave of the virus will disrupt the league’s operations at a critical time, when they expect to be entering an expanded version of the playoffs that I haven’t bothered to figure out. Predicting the course of the virus has proven impossible even for the most informed scientists, so I won’t go there, but I would point out that the insistence on playoffs was a serious misread of what fans were actually pining for.
Playoffs are critical for the league to make money, but as illustrated by the lukewarm reception to the endless stream of classic games rebroadcast by MLB and ESPN, what we were really missing was just the tempo that games provided us in summer. I can’t handle a nailbiter of an ALCS Game 6 every damn night. Most of the time I just want the comfort of a completely meaningless Tigers/Orioles day game. If the league had committed to say, half a season, 81 games, and said “We’ll evaluate the playoff possibilities as we get closer to the Fall,” they’d have properly articulated what fans want. Instead, they’re forcing a product down our throats (or more appropriately, up our noses) that’s clearly uncomfortable to manage for players, and that just doesn’t feel right for spectators.
Plus, as it becomes increasingly clear that the US fucked this up bad at every possible juncture, the return of sports feels more and more like the necessary return of an economy that will cost lives, which is all the grosser because it’s being sold to us as a return to cultural normalcy, that it’s something that fulfills an emotional need, which, I’ll be the first to admit, yeah, it does that for me, but it’s telling that in a moment when I thought the sight of Andrew Benintendi shagging fly balls would have resonance, I just felt sad and a little betrayed.