Some things to do now that there is no baseball
It'll come back eventually. But it might be a while.
Following the NBA’s lead, MLB suspended the end of Spring Training and the beginning of the regular season. As a person who likes baseball, writing to others to presumably like baseball, this is bad news.
As someone who would prefer that global pandemics not kill millions of Americans, this is good news, of course. So there are pros and cons!
But regardless of whether it is better to play baseball or not risk mass infection of an extremely contagious disease — the powers that be have very rudely ignored me on this, by the way — the fact is that baseball is gone and will be for a while. So let’s figure out some things for baseball fans to do to fill in the gaps.
(Note: I am not recommending anything that involves going outside because who knows how long we’ll be able to do that)
If you like baseball because you simply enjoy watching high level athletic competition, well, dang, there’s not a lot of that going on right now. But here’s where you can find that: the past! There was so much professional sports in the past, and you can watch a lot of it for free right now. Like, here’s Game 4 of the 2012 World Series. Matt Cain versus Max Scherzer! Buster Posey with a dramatic homer! Ryan Theriot scoring the (spoiler alert) winning run! All sorts of good fun.
Here’s the second game of the 2017 season. Here’s the game where Ross Stripling flirted with a no-hitter against the Giants (if you don’t remember that game, it’s better than it sounds). Here’s the Jose Bautista bat flip game. And there are so many more! You can still watch baseball; it’ll just be baseball that has already happened, and baseball where you can look up the results. But perhaps that doesn’t appeal to you. Okay! Let’s see what we can come up with.
If you like baseball because you like not knowing what’s going to happen next, just follow the news! It’s got all kinds of crazy twists and turns you’ll never see coming. Now Tom Hanks has the coronavirus! Wild! Now Justin Trudeau’s wife has it! Oh man! Now the head of the medical association in an entire Italian province died from it! Whoa! Shit just got real!
If you like baseball because you like stats, again, you’ve got the news! More than 130,000 people worldwide are infected, with almost 5,000 dead. The Dow Jones dropped 10%. South Korea tests 10,000 people per day and the US has tested 11,000 people total. If you love deep dives into numbers, then boy oh boy is this the pastime for you.
If you like baseball because you like things that are cool and interesting that others, for some dumb reason, find boring, then read a book! This one’s kinda a gimme.
If you like baseball because you like the feeling of desperately wanting something to happen, and seeing a path to it happening, and then having it suddenly ripped away, taking a piece of your soul with it and sending you into a spiral of hate, then just refresh Twitter a couple times. You’ll get there.
If you like baseball because you like the combination of strategy and tension and randomness, then maybe instead of baseball games, you can try other kinds of games, like board or video. Board is better if you have another person with you, of course, while video is preferable if you like being destroyed by an 11-year old who then pretends to dip his character’s balls in your character’s mouth.
If you like baseball because you like all of these things combined in one package, uh, yeah, that’s a tough one. If the thing you like can’t be broken down into its component parts and you find it irreplaceable in the rhythm of your life, then unfortunately, you’re just gonna have to wear it.
Baseball being cancelled isn’t in the top 1,000 worst things about the virus. It has, however, created a hole in our lives that needs filling. There are so, so many reasons to hope for as quick a resolution as possible to this public health crisis. This is just one.