Tag: Covid-19

Baby Steps

(This story originally appeared in the Official 2020 New York Yankees Yearbook.)

Part 3 of my Pandemic Baseball series picks up right where Part 2 left off, and by this point in the season, I’d gotten enough glimpses of the bizarre day-to-day absurdities that the story almost wrote itself. I loved getting to highlight the things that I had never seen before, and would never see again — how about walk-off homers by the Mets at Yankee Stadium, or Yankees relievers scoring the winning runs in games despite never batting, or sacrifice flies to lead off innings?

It was all so weird, and it allowed me to play with a version of a quote that I heard sometime like 400 times during the season: “It’s 2020, man …” I think I got that into the story three separate times, but it’s perfect in its way. The 2020 was real, and the Dodgers’ championship rings are plenty shiny, but everything felt just enough like fantasy to allow us to shake off some of the individual moments. “It’s 2020, man,” was the perfect shoulder shrug in word form.

There’s fun stuff in here. I loved getting to tell the story of Deivi García’s debut and his repertoire with Erik Kratz. I really enjoyed learning that the Yankees were worse in late-and-close situations at home in 2020 than they had been in any year since the new Yankee Stadium opened, which seemed like a fairly clear indication that the special sauce of Yankees fans might be even more important that we’ve thought all these years (and I really loved Tampa Bay’s Blake Snell saying that he would sometimes curse at himself in the bullpen to make up for the absence of fans’ creative vulgarities).

This was a fun series to write. I missed the clubhouse access, and I missed the ability to write about things behind the scenes that fans weren’t seeing. This year, I kind of felt like I was sitting in the same seats as my readers were, which was challenging. But it also allowed me to (and really forced me to) see the game differently. I felt that this year, I was analyzing more than I was unveiling. It was more storytelling than reporting. I had fun with it. That said, I can’t wait to get back into the clubhouse sometime soon.

https://www.mlb.com/yankees/news/yankees-magazine-2020-season-review?t=yankees-magazine

A New Path Forward

(This story originally appeared in the August 2020 edition of Yankees Magazine.)

It’s hard to explain how weird it is to be writing about baseball right now. The diversions I’ve taken in the past few months to writing music stories … those have just been so much easier. I’m not even totally sure about why — after all, one of the stories I wrote was about going to three concerts in London days before the world shut down due to COVID-19. I’m not sure that was any more responsible than a baseball game; in fact, it was certainly more dangerous.

But there’s the obvious fact that for a lot of us, the idea of baseball (or any American sports) coming back when the tri-state area was exploding in March and April was as some future reward for good behavior. If we stayed home like we were told, and if we did everything we could to let the virus run its course, we could get our normal lives back.

New York Yankees

Instead, the situation today is objectively worse than it was even when the hospitals in New York City were overflowing. But here we are. If you can’t tell, I’m not thrilled about any of this, and it has felt really dirty these last few weeks to be putting out a magazine, even before Juan Soto tested positive on the day of the opener. You almost want it to rain, a feeling I’ve never before had on Opening Day. So it goes.

Anyhow!

My job demands that I enthusiastically welcome the return of the game that I do truly love. And I’m going to watch this season, cheering on some great stories, closely watching a Yankees team that should be legitimately special. So when I was assigned a story about the months that have led up to baseball returning, I didn’t want to go all Debbie Downer and pour cold water on everyone’s plans. Instead, I tried to look at some things we might not have been looking at that were going on while we should have been playing baseball.

New York Yankees

For example, I spoke to YES Network executives about running a sports network without sports. I spoke to a minor league marketing executive about marketing a league that doesn’t really exist this year. I chatted with players about using their time away to protest and support the Black Lives Matter movement, and I spoke to another guy on the team about playing video games semi-professionally in the interim.

Like I’ve said, none of this is going to be easy. Maybe we should be playing, maybe we shouldn’t. But the fact is, we are. So we might as well enjoy it, because, for better — or more likely, for worse — baseball is back. Finally.

https://www.mlb.com/yankees/news/yankees-magazine-2020-season-begins