Bonus

Sportface: Baseball In Arizona, A Trip to the Twilight Zone

By Sammy Sportface

Posted on April 9, 2020

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Sportface knows Baseball may return. But when it does it will be something far different than America’s national past-time.

Yesterday news broke that Major League Baseball teams are thinking about holding games in Arizona. They would arrive at the park – six feet apart. They will sit in the grandstands – six feet apart.

Why does everything – even baseball – have to be so damned six feet apart from everything else? Staying six feet apart will go down as one of the least pleasant directives in the history of world civilization.

All the games could be played in close by Arizona stadiums. There will be no fans in the stands. There will be no cheers. There will be no beers.

Go ahead, shed a few tears.

Mike Trout, the game’s best player, will be interviewed about this funky situation and say something like. “Yeah, this is definitely weird. When we sit six feet apart in the stands, it doesn’t seem like we are teammates. It doesn’t even feel like we’re friends. This isn’t baseball. This is the Twilight Zone.”

Across the rest of the country, gigantic baseball stadiums remain empty: Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park, Dodger Stadium, and on and on. Maybe they’ll be converted into hospitals. Seems like every building is becoming a potential hospital.

The world has been rattled to its core. Baseball has been relegated to a sideshow to be played, maybe, in one state only. The pandemic has shrunk the game into a minimalist freak show.

Just Arizona baseball. Every day, all day, but nowhere else. Until who knows when.

The extraordinarily bright sun in Arizona will make the ball games feel like you’re watching people melt. We will wonder: What happened? How did it all come to this?

The pandemic. Two months ago most of us didn’t know what that word meant. Now everyone does from Alaska to the Philippines to Australia. Some 180 countries have people infected with the coronavirus.

Deaths by the day. Deaths at night. Deaths all day long. Deaths happening so fast, every two minutes or so, that’s it’s disturbing to contemplate. Deaths coming at us like they never have in our lives.

What went wrong?

Something cataclysmic happened. No, cataclysmic isn’t a strong enough word. It’s worse than that.

Maybe a virus-infected bat bit an animal and a human ate the animal. Then a virus attacked the world’s insides, causing tens of thousands of people to stop breathing.

Their lungs couldn’t fend off this virulent, wicked, and totally ruthless virus from hell. So, they succumb, day after day. People stopped working. Not some people. Virtually all people. No exaggeration. America shut down its entire economy for the first time ever. What?

If three months ago you told someone this would happen, they would have laughed at you for being mentally deranged. If you handed this storyline to a Hollywood movie producer, they would tell you your story is absurd and would never happen.

But it did. It sure did. We all wish it didn’t. The damage is enough to make you delusional just thinking about it.

So we stopped our frenetic lives. We sit. We don’t go anywhere. We don’t touch. We don’t hug. We keep clear of other people which, of course, is not good because people need to interact with each other.

All of us are staying apart, deliberately not getting close even though that’s what people need most. 

Really? 

Really.

This is no game. This is bigger than the power of Mike Trout’s bat. This is bigger than baseball. This is bigger than Arizona. This is bigger than the sun.

This isn’t about keeping six feet apart. This is about a mind-boggling number of people who are going to be buried six feet underground.