I Miss Baseball.

Someone—I can’t remember who—said that there was one quality that made baseball unique and different from all other sports: “You can go to a baseball game and relax.“

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It doesn’t matter if you’re in the stands sipping a beer or at home in your TV-watching chair.  Either way, you can relax and wait for something interesting to happen. It almost always does.

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Bob Fontaine, a major league player, manager and general manager, once told me, “If you go to a baseball game and don’t see something you’ve never seen before, you weren’t really paying attention!”

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I remember taking my daughter to see the Hawaii Islanders play one summer evening probably 30 years ago. The game was meandering along at a relaxed pace when—Bam! Bam! Bam!—the Islanders pulled off a Triple Play. If I’d gone to get a hot dog and a beer, I would have missed it. It’s the only one I’ve ever seen.

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Of course, thanks to this damn coronavirus, the only televised baseball that I’m able to watch these days are Red Sox games from previous seasons. They’re on NESN every day—that’s the New England Sports Network.

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Every game brought up out of the archives is of interest to Red Sox fans for one reason or another: Roger Clemens striking out 20 Seattle batters in a 1986 game, for instance. Or David Ortiz homering with two men on base and two out in the bottom of the 9th to beat the Texas Rangers by a run ten years ago.

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But here we are, halfway through May in 2020 and, for probably the 10 or 15th time over the past dozen years, I’m watching the Red Sox defeat the Yankees in game four of the American League Championship Series in 2004.

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That’s all well and good, but I wish they would figure out how to get the regular season going. 

.Because I miss baseball.