Baseball on mute

And they'll walk off to the bleachers and sit in their shirt sleeves on a perfect afternoon ... And they'll watch the game, and it'll be as if they'd dipped themselves in magic waters ... Oh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.
-- Terrance Mann
"Field of Dreams"

Except they can't now, Ray.

Except now the Bastard Plague has walked out of the corn with Shoeless Joe Jackson and the boys, and even if every person coming to Iowa without even knowing why he's doing it dips himself in Magic Hand Sanitizer, the risk will be too great. No one will be sitting in the bleachers in their shirt sleeves on a perfect afternoon, Ray. They'll be sitting in their backyards drinking a beer and looking like Old Testament prophets because they haven't had a haircut since February.

And therein lies the problem, as Major League Baseball rolls out its vision of a season in the time of COVID-19.

The problem is, sitting in the ballpark on a perfect afternoon is more than just cinematic cotton candy; it's an intrinsic part of the baseball experience. If the game is balls and strikes and outfield shifts and the sacrifice bunt, it's also cold beer on the tongue and the popcorn smell that seems to seep into the very concrete and steel of the place itself.

It's the sound a good piece of wood makes when it strikes a round ball square. It's the pop of leather and the sweat of a hinges-of-hell July scorcher.

The ballpark hotdog never happens without the ballpark. Just sayin'.

And so baseball can carry on with its plan for an 82-game season starting around the Fourth of July, if government and health officials give the OK. But the plan is to play the games where allowed in empty ballparks. Which begs the question: If you play baseball in an empty ballpark, does it make a sound?

Or to put it another way: If you play baseball in an empty ballpark, is it really baseball?

After more than a century and a half the game and its environs are woven so tightly together it's impossible to pick at one thread without unraveling the whole. Unlike any other sport in America, so much of what baseball became in this country is because of where it became.

Are the Cubs the Cubs without a cold Old Style in the Wrigley Field bleachers on a blazer of an afternoon? Are the Yankees the Yankees without the monuments in Yankee Stadium? Are the Red Sox the Red Sox without Fenway stuffed to the gills with Sullys, and Yaz playing the carom off the Green Monster like a Stradivarius?

With but a few exceptions no one goes to a football stadium or a basketball arena just to see the football stadium or the basketball arena. But one gray March day in Boston, when I was in town to cover Purdue in the NCAA East Regional, I bought a Charlie card and took the T to Fenway Park just to see Fenway Park. And it was March and I couldn't even go inside.

Baseball is baseball because, across the decades, it's also been Fenway and Wrigley and Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds. But none of that would have been true if Fenway and Wrigley and Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds had been filled with nothing but echoes.

Steve Bartman never becomes Steve Bartman, because he's not there to reach out for that baseball in the left-field corner. Red Smith never writes the most famous baseball lede of all time, describing a drunk getting on the field and eluding pursuit in the wake of Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard 'Round The World. On and on.

So, yeah, baseball can resume in July, and we can all watch the games on TV. But let's face it. It'll be like watching a movie with the sound off.

It'll be like another day in Boston -- Fourth of July, actually -- when the fam and I were on vacation and we took the T into the city to walk around Fenway. For some reason, I thought the Red Sox were out of town that day, but they weren't. They had an afternoon home game, and so Yawkey Way was swarming with people.

Eventually, we ducked into a restaurant that ran underneath the park along the third-baseline. From there, we watched the game on TV, while the sound of the crowd in the ballpark filtered distantly down to us. It was as if we were there, but not there.

It was as if it were baseball -- but not, you know, baseball.