The Royals played a real baseball game, finally, sort of, in season opener at Cleveland
.JPG "Kansas City’s Erick Mejia, left, and Franchy Cordero showed their support for social justice on opening day as they took a knee and held a black ribbon before the Royals played in Cleveland.")
They played baseball here, real baseball, the kind that counts in the standings and everything. First time for the Royals in 299 days. Thank goodness. But also: We’re really doing this, huh? Sports in a pandemic? OK (and thank goodness).
The Royals did all the baseball things. Danny Duffy threw some terrific pitches and cursed himself after others. Whit Merrifield hit baseballs hard. Adalberto Mondesi made a play in the hole. The hitters struck out a lot. They lost, if you care about that, 2-0 to the Indians here. Eighteen strikeouts is a lot, right?
Baseball is back! Happy paragraph! We’ve never needed a reliable companion more, something to cheer for, something to scream at, something to feel. Come on in here, old friend. Walk-up songs and mitts popping and bats cracking and a truly horrendous strike zone. Salvador Perez smiled. Jorge Soler swung hard. It’s like baseball never left.
But this is not normal! Weird paragraph! There is something surprisingly sad about watching foul balls bounce around the seats with nobody chasing. The loudest the stadium got was when a bunch of motorcycles drove by. Mondesi played the entire game in a face mask. Baseballs were dumped constantly, exiled to storage buckets until five days have passed and they can be used again.
We’re all guessing. We all have perspectives. We all have emotions. At times, they change by the minute and, actually, here’s a good example — essentially the same question posed to Royals manager Mike Matheny and All-Star Whit Merrifield.
Did that feel like a real game? Like opening day?
“To us, that felt like opening day,” Matheny said.
“Honestly, it sucked,” Merrifield said. “It was an opening day and the atmosphere sucked.”
God bless Merrifield. We as humans have a truly incredible ability to normalize. Studies have shown that almost regardless of what happens to us — good or bad — we tend to revert to a baseline level of happiness or displeasure or optimism or frustration or whatever our most natural state might be.
And so it is that we’re here, a lucky few hundred anyway, with sort of a private screening for live baseball and dangit if there weren’t stretches of time you got lost in the game. You thought along with the pitcher, or you noticed the outfielders playing comically deep, or you wondered if the third baseman should’ve had that grounder.
That’s part of the draw. You know this. We all do. Sports have power that way. But it’s also true that once that trance is broken — even for a second — you realize you’ve been wearing a friend’s surgical mask for five hours and you’re not even allowed in the main press box because you flew in from out of town and the next day you have another travel day where your main objectives are to not touch anything and not be near anyone.
Baseball is the first major American sports league to play through the COVID-19 pandemic in home markets, often in communities (including Kansas City) where cases are going up. MLS established a bubble and still had to send two teams home.
This is probably the kind of thing that looks ridiculous and insane from the outside but feels dutifully careful and almost necessary from the inside. Masks are everywhere. Everything from ballpark arrivals to training schedules to clubhouse geography has been altered to minimize exposure.
Besides, you want to know how important sports are to Americans? Forget the billions of dollars and millions of fans and countless hours spent arguing and sharing and crying and feeling.
The clearest example is that we’re here, splat middle of a pandemic that’s shuttered businesses and closed schools and rocked the economy, and we’re watching live sports because you’re dang right that’s what we’re doing.
We’ll trim the season by 102 games — the Royals on Friday essentially lost the equivalent of three games in normal times — and expand the postseason and plan for positive tests and cross our fingers and say a prayer even if we’re not religious. Because we need sports.
We’ll watch baseball games without kiss cams or screaming voices begging you to buy a hot dog. We’ll demand games in empty stadiums if we have to, so quiet a baserunner’s slide can be heard in the third deck (if a fan was up there, anyway). A pitcher’s self-cursing will echo off the seats, and a coach’s distinct whistle to position the outfielders will be heard from the streets.
But we’ll still have organ music and public address announcers (though official scorers will stay home). Baseball teams will conduct position meetings through Zoom calls, everyone subtly working on that awkward balance between looking at the person on the screen (for connection) and the camera (for eye contact).
Pre- and post-game fireworks have stuck around, perhaps America’s most reliable crowd-pleaser with no crowd to please.
Baseball seasons are team sports’ closest approximation to a marathon. They’re about stamina and resilience. They’re about forming an identity. They’re about evolving stories and riding out slumps and maximizing hot streaks. Hopefully we’ll get back to that kind of baseball season soon.
But for now, this baseball season will be about which teams avoid COVID-19 the best as much as which teams play baseball the best. And as much as the Royals struggled to make contact Friday night, they’ve had just as many problems with the virus.
They’re among the league leaders in that statistic, with eight known positive tests (though not all teams have been as transparent). They opened the season down a middle-of-the-lineup hitter and two of their best three starting pitchers.
You can ruin a day depending on how you think about all this, and for how long. The truth is that the Royals almost certainly aren’t doing a worse job of guarding against the coronavirus than their fellow clubs. The truth is that the Royals are doing the best they can, like everyone else, and guessing — like everyone else.
They’re trying to contain a virus we’re still learning about, with imperfect data and imperfect tests. Like all of us.
Does that mean these games should not be happening? Maybe! There are a thousand reasons to be worried. The cold truth is those same reasons will exist tomorrow. Tonight, it’s baseball. And again tomorrow. And again the next day and the next day and the next day.
Let us be happy about that, at least.