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I woke up this morning and put on my “Suffering From Baseball Withdrawal” hoodie. I’ll be telecommuting for the first day today as part of an optional company policy to help with social distancing and to be honest I am still in a bit of shock. It’s not that I didn’t see this coming. After all, as many of you know my non-baseball job involves planning events for students. I’ve spent the last two weeks contingency planning to undo about four months of work. The writing has been on the wall for a while now that events involving large amounts of people and/or travel would be disrupted due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
The shock is more how quickly the world shifted, and how quickly every major sports league, event and other community organizations all reached the same conclusion — we need to shut it all down immediately. Andi and I reacted to this with an emergency edition of Cuppa Cubbie Blue last night:
While they all offer a similar type of respite and enjoyment, sports leagues are pretty different in terms of their priorities and how they manage their day-to-day operations. I’ve written about this a bit comparing the way MLB and the NBA market their players. However, on COVID-19, an issue of player and public safety, there was no disagreement. It is stunning to consider that it took less than 24 hours for organizations who don’t agree on much to agree on hitting the pause button on signature events like the Boston Marathon, March Madness, playoff races, and the start of the 2020 baseball season.
This is an historic moment.
I’ve had a lot of people ask me what we are going to write about, or in the case of Cuppa Cubbie Blue, talk about, for the next few weeks. This diary is a partial answer to that. I don’t know what the stories are going to be, but I do know we are living history right now, and the stories will come. So consider this your daily stop for my observations of the temporary cancellation of baseball. I have no idea where this journey is going to take us fans, but I know it’s important to document and talk about it.