I'm going to write another baseball post and beg your indulgence. The season starts today and I'm excited.
Last season was strange. No fans in the stands. Cardboard cutouts. A short season. It was necessary because of the pandemic, but I also missed baseball so hard. (Notice I did not say firm!)
I heard some announcer or analyst...shrug...someone say that baseball marks the passage of history. That we can mark time by the games and I discovered how true that was when there were no games to mark the passage of the days. It felt wrong, and although I know starting the season on time is a little risky, I'm glad they're trying. I feel like everyone learned a lot from doing it for 60 games last year, so I'm hopeful we can manage this full schedule.
And as the vaccine rolls out and more and more people get it, there should be more and more fans allowed in the ballpark as the season progresses. Maybe.
That was something else that was so strange. How quiet everything was even with the piped in sounds.
I didn't realize how weird it really was until the off season when I was re-watching the postseason games that the Dodgers won. (Vin Scully made me a Dodger fan.) I mostly was watching the National League Championship Series and the World Series--the games that had limited fans allowed to attend. And then I watched the game the Dodgers played against the Padres. There were no fans for that game. It was a huge difference! The games with the fans present even at 25% were much more fun to watch.
Let's hope we can get through this entire season without any outbreaks. Let's hope we can find a new normal once people are vaccinated and we can go to games in person again.
Here's to a more normal 2021 and a normal-ish 2021 baseball season.
