Five weeks ago, on a cool early morning, the shutters of the press box at the Twins’ spring training facility in Fort Myers slowly opened. The sights, sounds, and smells of spring training baseball brought the deserted room to life. On the field, two players played a light game of catch in the outfield. The grounds crew raked dirt behind home plate. Palm trees blew in the distance, the wind sending untethered papers flying around the room. Later that day, the 2020 Twins—on paper, Minnesota’s best team in decades—would play the Pirates in front of 7,411 fans. The misery of winter was in the rear-view mirror, replaced by the never-ending optimism of spring training and anticipation of a summer of memories that hadn’t yet happened. Now, they may never happen. The optimism and anticipation left along with the sport itself, replaced by the surreal realization that the world as we knew it no longer exists. In our near-apocalyptic reality, everything is upside down. Our instinct to band together and support each other in difficult times is exactly what we can’t do. The desire for normalcy—work, parties, lakes, ballgames—has to be pushed further and further away, replaced by isolation, tedium, and for many of us, bouts of paralyzing anxiety. Our comfort food is gone, the daily fixes we crave snatched from our hands before we could even get a final hit, and now it’s cold-turkey withdrawal, whether we like it or not. As it pertains to baseball, two things can be true: 1) Entertainment, no matter your preferred choice, doesn’t matter right now. More than a hundred thousand people have died from COVID-19 globally, and by the time this ends, that number could stretch into the millions. Many more have lost their jobs, or someone they loved. Our society still […]
