Reese Kaplan -- 2020 Baseball As It Is

Opening Day is a different experience every year.  Sometimes it’s a road trip to the ballpark, sometimes it’s a gathering at the local watering hole, and sometimes it’s couch surfing in front of the big screen seeing it all in living color at home surrounded by good food and adult beverages.  

This year is going to be very different due to changing the rules as you go along compared to previous encounters as a result of an interest in preserving safety for yourself, your friends and your family members.  Some folks are going to watch the game “together” by tuning into their TV while simultaneously using Zoom to provide a livestream chat experience to praise what goes well and to criticize what doesn’t.  

Of course, me being 2000 miles away from the action on the border of Mexico and New Mexico here in El Paso, Texas...the online broadcast is the only way for me to participate in the experience at all.  I could log into the Zoom conference with my friends, but a 4:00 PM EDT start time for the game is still just 2:00 PM out here and in the middle of the work day.  Remember work?  Yes, even though I work from home I still have online meetings, paperwork and deadlines to meet.  Shelving regular work time to watch Opening Day isn’t going to fly, unfortunately.

We’ve all been anxiously awaiting the start to regular baseball once again.  It’s a feeling of normalcy.  It’s a fulfillment of the fix we’ve been denied since winter pre season was shut down.  It’s somewhere that scores are kept, stats are logged and you feel the mix of pleasure and pain when things go right and wrong.

Once we get past the DH, the extra inning man-on-second, the lack of fans in the stands, the fact that games are broadcast remotely from screens in front of Gary, Keith and Ron, we will realize that this is real baseball.  The scores count.  The results count.  The standings count.  We may be down a variety of players due to illness and injury, but we’re hardly alone.  The Braves are missing Freddie Freeman and others, then they wanted to bring in Yasiel Puig to make up for his absence only to find out he’s tested positive, too.  

All around baseball players are out with either positive test results, a propensity to bring infections to their families or simply a desire not to expose themselves and the people they care about to a potentially fatal illness.  Quite a few big names are gone, but every team also finds themselves missing starters and key bench players, many of whom are listed as “personal reasons” or “undisclosed illness” that prevent them from being in the lineup.  

How are you going to judge the Giants when Buster Posey is missing, or the Yankees minus Aroldis Chapman, or the Mets without Jed Lowrie, er, Brad Brach, er, Jared Hughes?  Then there’s the fact that the batting coach is sitting out and operating remotely over Zoom with his assistant.  What will the impact be on the run scoring?  How will the pitchers do when other teams are missing key hitters?  Time will tell.