If we count it and agree on a champion, the baseball season in 2020 will first have been about elements other than baseball. That there can be no champion yet, that the season would rather end in a sad show city and a six-foot wave, was part of the deal at the beginning of it all.
This will always be a daily survey if a relatively small group – a few thousand – could conduct itself with more restraint than the rest. Could this couple for a greater good, for something more than themselves, take a temporary call on diligence, empathy and baseball?
And could they be lucky enough to ride the whole thing through the storm? Could she keep that obligatory? Could she attract those who are not?
Someone might want to win. First, they will have to stay upright for the baseball, which is where the real fight will have been, in the daily 21 hours around the baseball.
It’s mid – August, the St. The Louis Cardinals have not played a baseball game since the end of July. The front is not close by and their trainers may not have enough ice.
By Friday night, a week since they were shut down due to another bubble of positive coronavirus tests, 16 days since they left a series in Minneapolis on a journey that knew no bounds, the Cardinals are outlining workout plans, travel plans, game plans, filling red tubes with spit, protecting against bad news when their phones were ringing and really hoping that the virus grew bored of, among other things, destroying their season.
An eighth staff member, this time a coach, tested positive on Thursday, according to a source, bringing the known total to 10 players and eight others, and the Cardinals met. Today’s goal is to come on Saturday, which would mean you’ll be in Chicago on time for a doubleheader against the White Sox, get healthy and get there with enough baseball players to fill a 28-man roster.
Absent from the game for more than two weeks due to a COVID-19 outbreak, the St. Louis Cardinals now race to play 53 games in 45 days. (AP Photo / Jeff Roberson)
There are about 300 miles between St. Louis and Chicago, that does not seem like much in the age of aircraft. However, this remains the summer of 2020 and therefore the next strenuous task will be the first. That, the Cardinals will travel by car, a 4-hour journey without room stops or traffic or weather or Waze-less wrong turns or whatever else the summer of 2020 means. Probably, like, swarms of something we’ve never heard of, but it has caught on and suddenly makes total sense.
They now have something to look forward to after too many mornings of ‘not today’, a daily annoyance that also ran a distant second from the fact that 18 of them had an infamous virus. The plan was to get into a few quick rounds of batting practice, and then immediately move on to the buzzsaw which will require 53 games in 45 days, a schedule that allows them to also play two games on the day that between the end of the regular season and the start of the postseason, which is 55 games in 46 days, all with a 28-man roster.
That would be the cost of missing 14 games, from their initial positive to the definitive uncertain go-ahead. If the Cardinals rent all those cars, they might want to see if Hertz carries pitchers again as well.
The Miami Marlins, who did not play a game between July 26 and August 4, have allowed 45 players to take at least one at-bat or throw one pitch. One of those pitchers goes with both hands. They have played 12 games. Due to an outbreak, they switched 20 players between games three and four, who were separated by those eight days.
As a result, however, you mention this, starting with America’s inability to quell a pandemic (if we were worse off in a pandemic, we would have to call its men football), and including a Marlins permit was something. of this self-inflicted, the Marlins on Friday night, as the Cardinals caravan to Chicago, play their first home game of the season.
What awaits the Cardinals are three double-heads in five days, four double-heads over the rest of a half away August, seven double-heads in September, 11 double-heads in all, and maybe a 12th if needed for them around a 59th and 60th game to play on the day before the postseason begins.
It is not ideal. Of course there is none of that, and it never had to be. The alternative was for the season to go on without the Cardinals, just as it was for the Marlins, as it will be for whoever is next, if there is to be a next. How the Cardinals will have to lock themselves in for more than two weeks, ride 300 miles and then confront the most demanding of six weeks of baseball will be a daily mystery. How they’ll fix all those innings. How they will deal with all that pain and suffering. How to prevent another encounter with a relentless virus.
Then of course they will have to win baseball games, to try to be champions of something so much more than a baseball season. Someone might want to win.
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