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3/18/20

Reese Kaplan -- Yes, We All Miss Baseball, But Life Goes On



So St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone without the customary and traditional trappings that render it as memorable as our beer-soaked brains would allow.  The parades were cancelled.  Large group gatherings were suspended.  Even family get-togethers are shuttered as people fear mingling with others.  I felt sorry for my company’s cafeteria that had been planning a first-ever St. Patrick’s Day Feast (for a price, of course).  With my client having abandoned its 350 or so seats in the building, there’s pretty much no one around to plow through all that corned beef and cabbage. 


The parallel situation we encounter right now is the end of Spring Training where we are debating the position and roster battles, who should be cut, what teams still have excess that could be acquired via trade and what the Mets need to do to get off to a fast start.  Now instead the conversations are about who has Clorox wipes available, why do we need to horde toilet paper for a respiratory illness, and why off-shore sources like AliBaba have a half-million coronavirus test kits available, but here in the USA apparently only the super wealthy or famous have access to them.

Word filtered out this week about shutting down the Spring Training camps, not out of goodness of commissioner Rob Manfred’s heart, but because he saw what happened to the Utah Jazz and now sees what’s happening with a couple of Yankee minor leaguers.  Better to appear as if your intended route was the high road than run the risk of artificially extending the contagious outbreak. 


Another message that came out of the Major Leagues this week was that the Mets and just one other team have agreed to pay their minor league players despite the shutdown.  When you consider that minor leaguers earn less than minimum wage when you divide the number of hours worked by the salary paid, it’s not that much of a financial sacrifice for the team to make.  Again, taking the appearance of the high road is not something we expected, but we should applaud the unforeseen gesture as it helps the people in most need.  We have not heard, of course, about the paychecks denied ushers, food service workers, janitors or ticket takers, but hey, it’s all about the players, right?

The problem will eventually be controlled through some combination of preventive vaccines and curative medicines.  Until that time, though, think of it as the TB or Polio or other widespread pandemics of the past.  People are not used to this type of malady impacting them directly, so they are taking extraordinary means of trying to reestablish control.  I applaud the businesses, governments and school districts that are making alternative work-from-home arrangements for their constituents.  Never before have we attempted a full-scale VPN/Citrix/Web war on keeping our lives running normally, but now is apparently as good a time as ever to test whether or not we’re actually equipped as we thought. 


Yes, I agree it’s going to be a difficult period of Spring without baseball, but right now the survival of your friends and relatives, the economic and logistical upheaval the virus has caused and the necessity for finding both prevention and cure should all predominate your priorities.  Remember, to satisfy that baseball itch there’s always YouTube, ESPN, Nintendo and other sources for historic or fake baseball.  If it’s the latter you’re seeking, just Google the Astros. 

2 comments:

  1. Mrs. Mack made me my yearly corn beef and cabbage dinner but it just wasn't the same as eating it at the bar in my old 2nd avenue dive, sitting next to a drunk that was asleep with his head on the bar.

    In the old days, people put their money on the bar and the bark keep would just take what was needed every time someone would order an Irish Whiskey and beer back.

    This always gave me the chance to take a ten from his stash and pay for my meal.

    Seriously, check out my 9:30 post.

    I cal for the end of baseball for the entire season, someplace we are probably heading anyway,

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  2. Being of curious ethnicity, my mother's side was half Irish and half Jewish. My father's side was Russian and Jewish, so 25% of me craved Irish whiskey and the traditional corned beef & cabbage. When my mother moved nearer to my brother and I in Union County, NJ we found a Polish restaurant of all unlikely places that featured a top notch and inexpensive St. Patty's Day dinner. That became our go-to tradition since my mother was not up to cooking and it gave us an opportunity to socialize while someone else did the dishes. Neither my brother nor mother were much for drinking so I felt an obligation to make up for their sobriety :)

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