Baseball has always been more than just a game. When we need it, the sport we love will be back to help the healing process.
There’s nothing more comforting or familiar than the sound of a ball hitting a bat. For those of us who have familiarized and fallen in love with the sport of baseball, it’s easy to predict where a ball is heading based on that sound alone. The crack of the ball hitting a bat and the pounding of it hitting the catcher’s glove are two of the most recognizable sounds to a baseball fan. Baseball is comforting. It’s familiar. It’s reassuring. It’s where America (and more recently, Canada) has turned to in moments of uncertainty. It’s also been one of the best storytellers about where and who we are as a people and as a society.
It was Babe Ruth, a delinquent orphan from the streets of Baltimore showing us the true meaning of the “American Dream” during a time where impoverished America needed a hero. It was Yogi Berra and Joe DiMaggio, the sons of Italian immigrants, showing fellow immigrants and children of immigrants that there was room for a “Joltin Joe” and a “Yogi” in America. It was Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier during a time where African-Americans were fighting not just for equal rights, but for their lives during the height of the Jim Crow era. It was Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, and Roberto Clemente fighting to prove that Latin Americans could not only adapt to American baseball, but gain respect and thrive in it. It also was Mike Piazza hitting a walk-off home run for the New York Mets in baseball’s emotional return after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
No matter what America has been through, baseball has been there to tell its story. The good and the bad, it’s always been there. It’s been arguably the best lens in which to peer into the ongoings of American society. On March 12th, 2020 – baseball made the decision to postpone opening day. Though other sports were cancelled and postponed, delaying opening day felt more symbolically telling than anything. For the first time in the history of baseball, opening day would be delayed.
The world is currently filled with uncertainty known as the COVID-19 virus. A virus that has been shutting down American society, fittingly shutdown baseball. A sport that played through the fear and devastation that was World War II, couldn’t overcome this. While other sports cancelled and postponed their seasons and events, it always felt like baseball and all of its purity would be able to be there for us, because it always has been. There are bigger issues in the world right now than one man standing 60 feet and 6 inches away from another man, and thinking about the best way to throw a ball by him. That doesn’t mean we can’t wish it was here to distract us during these uncertain and anxious times.
Whether baseball resumes in April, May, June or later, the only guarantee is that we’re all going to need it. Once again, we’re all going to look to baseball as a way to “ease our pain”. We will, as we always have, look to it as a way of feeling comfortable and familiar again.
As America struggles to contain this vigilante virus, all we can do is hope that this particular saga of its history will end soon. Then once again society and baseball will once again feel normal.