Reese Kaplan -- Baseball is Back Warts and All

Well, the news that baseball is resuming is regarded somewhere between an “it’s about time!” and “who gives a damn?” among the remaining baseball fans.  Many people are ecstatic to have some semblance of normalcy resume in their lives and baseball is a medium that provides it.  Others have come to understand the magnitude of the pandemic and realize that there are many other ways to occupy about 2-3 hours of your time on a daily basis.  

For the Mets, it’s a doubly conflicted time period with the situations facing the club right now between the closing of Florida facilities for sanitizing, “Summer Training” taking place at Citifield, searching for and evaluating the offers of prospective buyers, figuring out what to do with the reduced number of minor league teams, and deciding who belongs on the extended rosters they are allowing for this abbreviated season.

The person for whom I feel the most sorry in all of this is not the deposed original manager, Carlos Beltran, but the newly selected skipper, Luis Rojas.  First of all, he didn’t have the whole off-season to plan for the upcoming year, rushing into Spring Training somewhat ill equipped for the analytical and planning exercises that he would have experienced had he been in the role immediately post World Series.  Then, after he did his best at making logic out of the prematurely ended Florida environment, he found out that the game (like most businesses) was going on hiatus for some undetermined period of time.  Now he’s being asked to operate at sprint speed to make sure the club is ready for this oddball season that’s beginning in less than a month.  The only plus for him is that he’s had the past several months to go through those exercises he’d previously missed.

I won’t rehash the questions about who plays and who sits as I’ve done recently.  The fact is that no matter what is done in 2020, there’s no precedent for it and hopefully no repeat of this experience in the future.  Right now the issue is getting 30 guys in daily playing shape, integrating the designated hitter, learning how to work with the extra inning man-on-second situation and figuring out how to win games knowing that your own job may be on the line for whomever the new owner turns out to be.

For the fans, as great a development as the resumption of baseball can be, the fact remains it’s not quite the same without the option of attending the games in person.  Even here in the quickly reopened state of Texas, an awful lot of backpedaling has made the interest of health finally start to get the attention it deserves with the governor now backing off to public gatherings of 100 people being the maximum allowed.  We may have laughed at the empty stands or modestly attired sex dolls that appeared in Korean stadiums, but that’s what you’re likely going to see in America.  I don’t know what they’re going to do about the Blue Jays who don’t even fall under US laws.  

The other truly odd wrinkle to the new season is that preliminary schedules seem to show a disproportionately high number of games within your division and interleague games against relatively local opposition.  While that news might be good when the team on the other side of the field is the Marlins or the Orioles, it’s not so good to face the majority of your season against Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington, the Yankees, the Red Sox and others who are among the best in the game.

Still, no matter how weird this season turns out to be, it’s good to have something that helps distract us from the pandemic, the election and the economy.  Whatever aberrations result from the forced rule changes are what they are.  The whole season is a bushel basket full of asterisks for all of the statistical metrics.  What we want out of the game is our passion for the game and the sweet relief that comes from our daily/nightly distraction.  

Once again I proclaim, “Play ball!”