This can't be happening, right?
This can’t be real. I usually can’t sleep the night before Opening Day. Instead, at the same time the Braves were supposed to be playing their first game of the season, it was as if I was on some caffeine kick keeping me up all night.
I couldn’t sleep. Then, I turned on Fox Sports Southeast and the cruelty of what was keeping me up reached a new level. The Braves were on. It was the game last September when they clinched the National League East. They were celebrating, hugging and all with no restrictions.
And then it hit me. The game should be over by now. Not the one I was watching on TV, but the one that should be playing to open the 2020 season. It was 1:10 a.m. ET, three hours after when the first pitch should have been thrown to start the new year.
All I could do is shake my head. In disbelief. Here we are, on March 26, the day we’ve counted down to for months, and the best I could muster was to watch the replay of a game from six months ago. That was all that was on.
We know why this is happening. We don’t question it. Our hearts are with the people who are sick and those who are taking care of them. But the grass is green, the sun is going down later, and it’s supposed to be baseball season.
This is like a bad dream.
For two weeks, we’ve had no sports. The fields are empty, so are the arenas. We just don’t know what do about this. Seasons change like the weather. When it gets warmer, after the cold temps of the winter months, it’s time to hear the sound of the bat hitting the ball, or to see a double stretched into a triple. It’s time for pitching changes, bad calls by umpires, runners left on base and bit hits in the ninth inning.
Just not this year. At least not yet.
This void hurts. It isn’t normal; nothing seems to be these days. Now I must try and go to sleep, knowing when I wake up, we’ll still be fighting this nightmare of a life with no baseball.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better, they tell us. And they’re not kidding, in more ways than one. This social distancing we’re doing from the game we love is unnatural, and right now, there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.
Listen to The Bill Shanks Show weekdays at 3:00 p.m. ET on Middle Georgia’s ESPN. You can listen online at TheSuperStations.com. Follow Bill on Twitter at @billshanks and you can email him at thebillshanksshow@yahoo.com.