By Mike Steffanos January 1, 2021
The most important news of the week for me, personally, is finally saying "adios" to the least favorite year of my lifetime. Other than that, things seem to be pretty much in a holding pattern. I find myself out of work for the second time since the pandemic began, and I'm still trying to figure out how to most productively utilize the new found time I have on hand. A lot of crappy things happened this year, but Lisa is home and doing better and better. As a lifelong Mets fans, watching the Wilpons precede 2020 out the door was a highlight that at least cancelled out a small bit of the badness of the year, and we Mets fans won't even need to endure a vaccine to prevent Fred and Jeff from returning.
I'll carry the scars from 2020 for the rest of my life. By far the worst part of 2020 was all of the folks who we lost to a disease that few people had ever heard of when the year began. Whenever I'm tempted to feel sorry for myself I'll step back and remember that I'm still here. Any part of my life that was damaged by the events of the past year can be fixed. Any obstacles placed in front of me can be overcome. Anything material that I've lost can either be replaced or lived without. For myself, the people I love, and all of you out there, I'm grateful for the simple fact that we're all still here.
As undeniably horrible as it was to watch the COVID-19 pandemic ravage the world, if there was one other thing that defined 2020 for me, it was waiting. I always seemed to be waiting for something. In the spring, it was waiting for some return of normalcy when the pandemic was at its absolute height in this part of the country and people were afraid to leave their homes. Going to work, being able to go out for a beer with friends or going into a grocery store and finding toilet paper were things that I took for granted when 2020 began. Other than toilet paper being easier to find, the other things still elude me.
Back when I began blogging again in March, I was still waiting for baseball to return, not even suspecting how long it might take or how brief that return would be. When the Mets were up for sale and the end of the Wilpon era was in sight, it felt like I waited forever for that sale to go through. Once it finally did happen, there was some expectation that a President of Baseball Operations hiring would happen quickly and then the player signings would follow shortly thereafter. Those expectations proved to be unrealistic, and while things did start to happen, it all seemed painfully slow. I'm not sure why I was surprised by this in a year that seemed to be so much about simply waiting for things.
Big signings may very well be in our future, fellow Mets fans, but we're still waiting for them. 2020 may be gone, but the waiting is still a thing. Even if the Mets make the splash most of us hope for in the free agent market, we'll still be waiting to see when spring training may start, and then the baseball season. Waiting will still be a thing.
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