Baseball has been back for about two weeks now, and the games are something nice to keep on in the background while I go about other tasks. I can’t say I follow the San Francisco Giants like I used to, but I will always root for them to do well. The days of spending three hours a day watching baseball is truly over, and that’s been the case even before the pandemic.
It feels as if there weren’t any baseball last year at all, though obviously the league did manage to hold a 60 game season late in the year, and the Los Angeles Dodgers are the World Series champion of 2020. An asterisk on them not because the team isn’t deserving, but to mark the year of the pandemic, where everything turned weird. Watching baseball on TV with no crowds in attendance is thoroughly unexciting, which is why I did very little of it last season.
With America doing a fantastic job of vaccinating its population, fans are once again allowed back into the stadiums. The ebb and flow of the crowd’s emotions throughout the game has been sorely missed. The cheers when the team scores, or the groans when the umpire misses a crucial call. These elements are essential to baseball, even though they don’t directly affect the outcome of a game one bit.
And it is the return of the fans in the stands that I am now happy to keep baseball on in the background. So that I can hear when something happens, good or bad, because the crowd noise will alert me to it. It’s also nice to watch an inning or two when I’m taking a break from whatever I am doing. Best of all, it’s good to see kids in attendance being given caught foul balls. That’s the magic of baseball that you don’t get from other sports: a souvenir and a memory to last a lifetime.
The battle between gray and green.