TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME
Baseball is back to save us from ourselves.
The first known COVID-19 patient in the United States was diagnosed on January 20. Opening Day was 66 short days away. Opening Day never arrived. The first pitch was never thrown. The winning run never crossed the plate.
It’s now early Summer 2020. Things are still not going as planned. Stadiums remain closed. Seats remain empty. Crowds remain crowdless.
No peanuts and cracker jacks. No ice cold beers. No CowBell Man.
No watching the Mets stumble their way to the All-Star break hovering around the .500 mark.
For three and half months we were rooting for a different kind of home team. The doctors. The nurses. The EMT’s. The first responders.
Only, the game was life threatening and wasn’t much of a game at all. So yes we are still rooting for them because essential workers have never been more essential and this pandemic is going to be here for a while.
But for three and a half months America’s pastime wasn’t around to distract us from America’s present time. Until Tuesday night when MLB and the MLB Players Association finally agreed on terms to start the 2020 season. Giving us a much needed distraction from a boiling stew of political, social, economic, cultural and public health issues that have paralyzed our thinking.
Baseball is back to save us from a system of blue checks and no balances. Where Twitter elites thrive on alienating their audience. Where cancel culture has replaced rational thought. Where we value retweets and likes over ideas.
An endless cycle of opinions pouring in 280 characters at a time. Welcome to the the #AllOpinionsMatter era.
But should all opinions matter if it means we’re diving head first into a bottomless pool of dangerously divisive social interaction?
Baseball is back to distract us from it all because the one constant through all the years has been baseball. People will come to Baseball for reasons they can’t even fathom.
America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.
This field, this game — it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.
Ohhhhhhhh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.
These are the words of Terence Mann, played by James Earl Jones, in the film Field of Dreams. It’s my favorite part of the movie. It’s the only part of the movie that matters. The movie itself is overrated. (Pause for the backlash)
But what this scene in the film reminds us of is that Baseball, with all its warts and past transgressions, is as imperfect as everyone last one of us.
The world we’re living in today may not be a field of dreams. But if there was ever a time where we could use a “seventh inning stretch” this would be it.
So sing with me. Sing it loud.
“Take me out to the ball game, Take me out with the crowd. Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack, I don’t care if I never get back, Let me root, root, root for the home team, If they don’t win it’s a shame. For it’s one, two, three strikes, you’re out, At the old ball game.”
Let the games begin.