(This story originally appeared in the September 2021 edition of Yankees Magazine.)
For Part 2 of my overhead view of pandemic baseball, I focused mainly on the sights and (lack of) sounds in Yankee Stadium. Covering baseball in 2020 was an enormous challenge, with magazine deadlines looming and black pages staring back at you despite next to no access to the players. One of the great joys of writing about baseball is the downtime. As frustrating as it can be sometimes to stand around a Yankees’ clubhouse with 50 other reporters and no baseball players to be found, there’s still so much that we can all learn from getting to chat with players, to make small talk, to ask questions out of view of the entire beat.
Obviously, everyone knew that things would be different in 2020, but as one of very few people who could be in the park during games, I really wanted to give a sense of what it looked and sounded and felt like. I wanted to know how players got themselves amped up, how gameday operations employees tried to get some sound into the atmosphere to trick the players’ brains, and how everyone tried to make the games feel as normal as possible. I also spent time chatting with all the people who made the YES Network broadcasts work despite the announcers sometimes calling games from three time zones away.
I’m proud of this series, and of the way that I think it will stand as a reminder of how weird everything was in 2020, even when we were kind of pretending things were normal again.
