Today is August 1, 2020. We are about a week into the restart of professional baseball, or I guess, more accurately referred to as Opening Day of the 2020 Major League Baseball season, a season that will go down as unlike any other.
At this point it is anyone’s guess if the baseball season, now scheduled for 60 regular season games will make it through to the playoffs and eventual World Series. A few days ago, when 19 of the Miami Marlins tested positive for the Covid, it put a rather large wrinkle into the already tight and tricky major league schedule.
Obviously, if one team is put under quarantine for any length of time, it has a ripple effect as not only their team but the team that they were going to play can’t complete the schedule as it is set, and then that rolls into next week, causing chaos at every turn. I read in today’s sports page that the season might not survive past the end of the weekend. Hence, I am back at the keyboard anticipating having to pinch-hit again for the professional baseball season.
SSOMG has seen some strange and weird things over the years in following all kinds of sports, but of course this year, by the time it is over, will certainly set new levels for strange and weird. It kind of leaves you wondering, do you think they will go back to game that it was prior to the pandemic?
Ok, so missing the first 100 games of the season has given us all time to do other things and not sit around and watch sports, or peek at our phones for the latest updates. It has made us realize that we probably spent too much time and put too much emphasis on how the Clayton Kershaw did today, or if Mookie Betts was really going to live up to his gi-normous, multi-year contract.
I, for one, took the extra time to learn how to replace my bike pedal that I broke after some steady use, averaging over 4 days a week of 45-minute bike rides. I struggled, but was able to repair the broken handle on the microwave. In the process I learned that if you rub a magnet on the end of a screwdriver, it magnetizes the screwdriver, sometimes indefinitely, making it easier to work with small screws in tight places. And of course I have spent a few hours pounding out short stories about sports subjects you weren’t aware of, nor considered yourself lacking for not knowing. (See, this whole experience has really not helped my understanding of the English language, and BTW, kudos to spell check and Wikipedia, without whom I would be lost and still working on Story #14).
Of course the Restart is a fine thing and a valiant effort to return the sporting world to some semblance of normalcy. We all long for a vaccine and the cure. Maybe it will be as easy as rubbing the magnet against the screw driver. After all, we are all just a bunch of small screwballs, often getting caught in tight places without the magic solution to put it all back together. Or maybe I will be sitting here a year from now, trying to end story #186 and scrounging around for the sports hero I forgot to mention, or perhaps the one that I haven’t yet even heard of. We can all hope that story #186 never has to be written….
In the meantime, Go Dodgers.
Sports Stories of My Generation 