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We Hope for Baseball

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The collective emotional roller coaster our homes, communities, states, nations and world have experience over the past week cannot be quantified with words.

But damn if it’s not like me to try. Leave it to a pandemic for me to sit down and type my first entry in so long I cannot recall.

The world around us moved so fast last Wednesday that it seemed unreal. The NBA was suspending its season?

Huh.

Thursday saw universities shuttered, college basketball conference tournaments cancelled, high schools move to eLearning.

Um, what?

Friday felt like the bottom fell out, the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament, a new kind of March Madness. Spring sports cancelled – including the College World Series in June – throwing eligibility questions and team rosters for the 2020-21 season into a quagmire that didn’t feel so giggity giggity.

And we thought the news was all filled with doom and gloom before?

I told my wife Friday afternoon that my brain hurt. I couldn’t comprehend much more that day, think of any more angles to cover or next steps after the next steps. I needed wine tequila and a hoodie.

2020 will be forever remembered as when “Social Distancing” became apart of the American lexicon, when everyone from the age of two to 92 could recite proper hand washing protocols.

It will be remembered when we learned everything in our economy is connected, that an essential freeze halted us in our tracks. We quarantined, we worked from home. We overreacted, we under-reacted.

We hoarded toilet paper.

Everything has effectively been put on hold. Youth sports, book clubs. Going out to dinner, a family cookout with grandparents. Spring break. Every Disney Park closed for weeks, every zoo and museum closed. No choir concerts, no parades, no church in person, no events really of any kind.

Everything. Has. Stopped.

But have we learned?

Nothing we didn’t already know.

That faith, hope and love are some good things He gave us, and while the greatest is love, the most important might be hope.

We need to hope we can get back to normal before July. Before June.

We’re holding out hope for high school baseball in our home state. My son, a senior, is a part of a team that won a state championship last season. His friends from his travel teams, scattered across the state, all want the chance to play before college. Most won’t get a chance to play in college, but it is not about that specifically.

It’s about Senior Night. It’s about Prom. It’s about hearing your name called for the final time. Crossing the stage with a diploma at graduation and graduation parties of definitely more than 10 people.

It’s about all we’ve taken for granted. The commute to work filled with podcasts that have fresh content about sports, movies, politics, whatever. Seeing our co-workers, sitting face-to-face in meetings, teaching in a classroom filled with people.

It’s been merely a week, and even the introverts like me don’t think we really understood how significant social distancing could be to the fabric of what it is to be American.

Maybe this is a chance to re-learn, to re-think the daily life and throw our routines out of whack. Are we adaptable? Are we unbeatable? Can we turn a negative, a 100 negatives, into a positive? Are we just catch phrases, or can we rise to the challenge and endure?

We’re always taking about how busy we are (I’m looking at, well, all of us).

Well, how about now? Time to read. Time to listen. Time to think. To take a walk. To get to know our spouses and kids again. To find a way to serve a purpose greater than ourselves.

Maybe this is our wake-up call.

What is truly important, and what is not.

Sure, we’ve clung tight to family. Personally, we haven’t turned into The Shining family around here…yet. And we appreciate our home, our jobs, our friends and our freedoms.

But hope, man.

Hope might be the most fascinatingly human emotion there has ever been. And we need it more than ever.

No matter your beliefs, your political allegiances, whether you call this a hoax or are digging your doomsday bunker as I type, this is history happening for better of worse in real time.

It is a stark reminder we are not in control, not even a little bit, not even at all. But like any good book or movie (that we’ve all probably re-watched or re-read three times by now), hope is a good thing.

It could be the hope we’ll stop losing our ever-loving minds. Hope that those who aren’t taking it serious will wake up to the fact that COVID-19 is a bit more threatening than we thought a week ago, or even a day ago.

Hope is why Hallmark is running Christmas movies in March. It’s why Disney+ put Frozen II up months before they were supposed to. It is why classic sports re-runs are a welcome distraction. Why Tom Brady going to Tampa Bay and leaving New England was something else to talk about for a few hours.

Because we do not know where this going. We do not know the impact on the economy, on our jobs, on our daily lives yet. And we won’t fully for some time.

But we hope.

We hope for the sick, we hope for the cure, for strong leadership, for our friends, for our industries, for our kids.

We hope for an appreciation of the life we lived two weeks ago and for a future that might be close to it.

So, yes, we hope for baseball in this house. And we hold out that hope, because without it, well, it just makes the brain hurt.

Stay safe. Stay informed. Stay good to each other.

Stay hopeful.

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Allen Iverson, Brett Favre, Major League Baseball, NBA, NFL, Sports, Tiger Woods, Yankee Stadium

From the Vault: A Few Good Fans

(Note: The following was originally written a little over two years ago, but some portions have been updated to fit the current times. It is being re-posted on this blog at the request of a Cube follower)
Dear Sports,
I hope this letter finds you well.
Oh, who are we kidding? We both know where this letter finds you – and it’s a hell of a long way from well.  
We need to talk, sports. We need to create a dialogue, an open line of communication – something you have a hard time doing amongst your owners and players in nearly even major damn sport America has.
If we don’t start communicating and conducting some much needed group therapy, I fear that we’ll drift further apart until our relationship is irrevocably damaged.
And the truth is, a divorce would hurt you much more than me or the rest of us fans.
You need fans, you really do. You think we just follow you in droves? We survived for hundreds of years without you, frankly. We made things in this country. We can get obsessed over muscle cars again, if we have to. We can play Angry Birds, we can all get into music and films. We don’t need you to survive.
We love you, but we’re not feeling the love from you right now.
Sure, you secretly despise us for our irrational behavior, our lofty expectations and our demands. And granted, it’s embarrassing for you when we wear paper bags during a bad decade or two. Or when we drink ourselves into a stupor and throw empty cups onto your players. Or when we confront them in the parking lot after the games.
We can take responsibility for our actions. Can you?
You haven’t exactly been treating us like royalty as of late.
Some of your guys (we’re looking at you, Charlie Villanueva) are Twittering, er, Tweeting (whatever bird sound it is) – at halftime, no less – to stay in touch with us. Sweet, really. But, um, maybe they should take it just a tad more serious?
See, we think that our favorite teams paying triple what a doctor or president makes (or roughly about 300 times what we make in our profession) brings on expectations that for six months during the season, they should, you know, try really, really hard and stuff.
And yes, Allen Iverson, I’m talkin’ about practice too, man.
Speaking of taking things serious, that’s part of the problem. Most of the time, when we fight, you accuse us of taking things too seriously and we don’t think you take it quite serious enough.
Different worlds, I suppose. You are not the one who has to clumsily explain the Tiger Woods sex scandal or baseball’s steroid era to their impressionable, inquisitive and sports obsessed nine-year-old.
Thanks for that, and all the naked athlete cell phone pics, by the way. It’s been a real treat spraining my thumbs trying to change channels when a new story breaks. And I’m fairly certain my children think I have a stutter because of my stumbling and baffled responses to their questions. But I digress.
As fans, we lack the resources, the guilty pleasures, the comfort of the payday you provide your players and coaches. In fairness, the vast majority of us don’t have the inherit skill to break down film, the athleticism, the stamina required or the knowledge of a particular sport. Then again, neither do many of the “gifted” people who announce the games for you, but that’s another story.
The one place we seem to outnumber you is in the passion department. We care about you a heck of a lot more than you care about us.
As professional leagues, you lack the passion that got you there – you forgot what it was like to be where we are. Remember empty stadiums? Remember when very few people wanted your autograph or thought your sport was a tad stupid?
Yet the passion of the athletes, owners and league offices pushed you to new heights from the 1950s-1990s. And the growing fan bases of your various sports helped a little bit, don’t you think?
So we ask, where’s the passion?
And that passion has little to do with work ethic. Most athletes are workout fanatics, busting their humps to chase a variety of things: respect, pride, trophies and, of course, a little coin.
Generally, though, pleasing the fans comes last. That’s cool, we’ve dealt with it and that simple fact explains so much.
It’s apparently why roughly 1,100 seats at the new Yankee Stadium are obstructed view. We’re not smart enough, apparently, to figure out why, in this day and age, any stadium – let alone Yankee Stadium – would be built with obstructed views. To us, that’s so 1920s.
The seats in new Yankee Stadium certainly don’t cost 1920s prices, though, do they? Even though we’re living an economy that reminds us of December 1929.
And yet, you still want $1,500 for ticket. For a single game.    
I gotta tell ya, Sports, the vast majority of us don’t make $1,500 every two weeks. And those that do are pulling into gas stations and watching it float away in a river of oil. 
So cut us some slack, will you? We’re looking for a little latitude, the same as you were with the steroid era, the NBA referee scandal and the BCS.
Now, we’re not dumb. We don’t expect $10 tickets to the Super Bowl. But work with us a little.We’d at least like to have seats that we paid for at the Super Bowl. Don’t shuffle us under the bowels of the stadium to watch it on TV because your people couldn’t get the stands together in time.
This is why we’re asking, and here’s the juicy part, where we hold all the power in this relationship – the part where you need us, but we don’t need you.
Oh, we want you, all right. Like a fat kid wants a cupcake. We lust after you, but if we can’t afford you – if you come between us and the mortgage, our kid’s college tuition, our groceries or potential family vacation…well, you’re gone.
This means that eventually, you’re really gone.
Oh sure, we don’t directly pay your salaries. These days ticket sales are just a small piece of the cash pie. But we fans find it more than ironic that your leagues are all arguing over pieces of that pie – a pie that’s adding up to $9 billion in revenue for football.
But if we stop coming to games, due to the economy or just being plain pissed off, well, who buys your $7 hot dogs and $8 beers? Who buys a t-shirt or jersey? Still think you’ll have $9 billion to argue over?
If concessions and novelties aren’t moving in the arena or the stadium – does the provider wish to continue leasing its services to you? If you have no place to play because no one is coming to your games, what are your franchises worth to rich Russians then?
Seriously, if it gets that bad in other aspects of life, if we’re just scratching for crumbs and we’re all shopping at Goodwill – if it’s a depression…well, you can think that far ahead can’t you?
If we can’t afford TiVO, cable TV, DirecTV, DISH, whatever…well, forget about live attendance – who’s watching from home? And if we’re not watching, how do the advertisers’ spots get noticed? And if the sponsors aren’t selling any products or finding any value, their money comes off the billboards, pregame shows…you get the point.
Or maybe you don’t. Maybe, for once, we need to explain it for you.
As an individual, what I spend on you over the course of a year is probably equal to what Frank McCourt spends in an hour of divorce attorney fees. If you lose me, or better yet, pieces of my wallet, you could care less because there are millions more just like me that will shell out the cash.
But what if a large portion of us fell by the wayside? What if 30 percent suddenly stopped spending our greenbacks on you? What about 50 percent? What about 60 percent?
Working up a sweat just thinking about it, aren’t you, Sports?
If this recession affects 95 percent of Americans, which has been indicated, isn’t it reasonable to think that a large percentage of that group might be cutting back on those things deemed unnecessary?
Sports, in times like these, your prices become unnecessary.
So, again, you need us.
In the spirit of Jack Nicholson and “A Few Good Men“, let me paraphrase:
You need us in your stands. You need us in your seats, holding beers, brats, gloves and banners. You need us on that wall – you want us on that wall. And our absence is the very thing your athletes and coaches don’t talk about in locker rooms.
You survive under the very blanket of security that we provide and we’re starting to question the manner in which we provide it. We’d rather you just said thank you by slashing prices and making things more affordable. 
We’d appreciate it if you built stadiums in the 21st Century that you can actually see the entire field from any seat, instead of giving us another worthless bobblehead night. Either way, we don’t give a damn if the economy has affected your bottom line – we are your bottom line!
And the bottom is about to fall out of this relationship.
Sincerely,
One of a Few Good Fans
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