Sara’s Diary: Day 3 without baseball

If you didn’t know better, you’d just think traffic had slowed down in Wrigleyville. It looks like a normal Sunday, just with fewer people and no one going out of their way to interact with anyone they don’t know. I went for a run this morning and had a lot on my mind. I wasn’t alone. The Lakeshore Trail was just like the neighborhood, people out and about, but fewer of them, and most very conscious of giving other people their space.

I couldn’t stop thinking about two things. The first were the crowds in Chicago from the last 24 hours. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was the tamest St. Patrick’s Saturday in my memory...but this still bodes incredibly poorly for the city of Chicago’s efforts to flatten the coronavirus curve:

It takes a special combination of youth and foolishness to decide you have to bar hop on St. Patrick’s Day. The scenes at O’Hare Airport were born of a fundamentally different threat, incompetence:

Apparently multiple flights from Europe arrived at the same time last night and absolutely overwhelmed customs in the international terminal of the airport. Passengers waited in these crowds for six to eight hours before being released into Chicago.

All I could think of was this GIF:

However, I can’t do anything about young people crowding bars in Wrigleyville or the incredible unforced error at O’Hare last night, so I spent the rest of my run thinking through what I’m going to read and watch without baseball while I’m spending far too much time in my little apartment for the foreseeable future. I was also thinking about this last night when I started this poll on Twitter:

I’m pretty squarely in the “Anything Else” category, although I admit I started “September 1918: War, Plague and the World Series” a book about the 1918 flu, World War I and baseball, recently. Fun fact, that World Series is the only World Series played entirely in September and featured the Cubs and the Red Sox.

I’m also super grateful to past me for having the foresight to TiVo all of Ken Burns’ Baseball, because that will definitely give me a few nights of great TV. If past you did not do that, you are in luck because PBS is allowing fans to stream all of it for free during the COVID-19 outbreak:

Past me also totally nailed it about a year ago when I decided to splurge and buy a Nintendo Switch because The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild just looked stunning. Between that and Civilization VI I am in pretty good shape as far as enthralling video games go.

But I am going to need some more recommendations here, and I imagine I am not alone. So consider Day 3 without baseball your space to share what you’re reading and watching without our nation’s pastime.