Kristin and I were supposed to be at Spring Training last weekend, and as soon as we cancelled our plans, it’s like we forgot.
It was a last minute thing anyway — we made the plans maybe two weeks before — but we were looking forward to it. Kristin’s gone to Spring Training every year but one since 2013; I’ve gone with her three times. It’s a little tradition we have, and we love spending time in Scottsdale, and it’s fun to check out minor league camp, and we like complaining about how ridiculously expensive tickets are at Scottsdale Stadium compared to anywhere else in the Cactus League, so in all, it’s just a good time.
We barely thought about it last weekend. We’re barely thinking about it now. It basically doesn’t matter at all.
Not to get all Brooks-from-The-Shawshank-Redemption, but it’s remarkable how fast the world changes. A week ago, we were all in “I hope this doesn’t get too bad” mode. Then, as soon as Rudy Gobert tested positive and the NBA postponed (or, if we’re being honest here, cancelled) the rest of its season, it was just the most natural thing in the world to jump right to, “Well, we’re fucked.”
And baseball got cancelled too. That’s exactly how it feels: like another thing that happened, because of course it did, because that’s the way the world is now. There won’t be any baseball games until mid-May at the absolute earliest, but no one actually thinks they’ll start by then, because of course they won’t, because that’s the way the world is now.
The Bay Area is shut down, and should be. The nation of Italy is shut down, and should be. Compared to that, baseball is so absolutely nothing that its cancellation just wasn’t ever going to have any effect.
It’s easy to take for granted while you’re in the middle of it, but our world is rich in so many ways that add color every day. Sports, and restaurants, and bars, and movies, and clothes, and music, and a hundred other things that make our society what it is. You take enough things away and those 64 Crayola colors get narrowed down to gray, cubist gray, and battleship gray. Once things are like that, it’s not hard to remember when they were another way, but it’s very hard to feel like they could be again.