Swinging and missing

I walked past the Wildcat diamonds by Arlington Elementary the other day, and of course there was no Wildcat baseball going on. No tiny kids with batting helmets wobbling atop their heads likes bowling balls on pencils. No bats resting on frail shoulders like I-beams. No "hey-battah, hey-battah," the soundtrack of summer rising into the blue summer sky.

There were only the diamonds, deserted and weedy. The sun had dried them out, and now the infield skin was white and corrugated with flakes where the rain puddles had been, like peeling sunburn or the scales of some preposterous fish.

Add the weeds sprouting everywhere, and it was a desert moonscape, desolate and sad in the way empty places are always sad. I looked once and then looked away, and kept walking.

All of which is to say is it's June and I miss baseball.

The Bastard Plague has stolen it like it's stolen so much else, but other sports are finding ways around it. In NASCAR they're racing masked up in empty venues. The NBA has concocted its Weird Thrown-Together Thing, although that might be in jeopardy now as Plague cases begin to spike again.

Baseball, however ...

Well. It's June and there's still no plan.

This is because the owners are pig-headed and the players are pig-headed and the well is poisoned with old grudges and ancient bad faith. Everything is about payback for slights forgotten by all but the principals. It's gotten so bad the owners never even bothered with a counter to the players' latest proposal; instead Major League Baseball simply rolled out a perfunctory "schedule."

No one was fooled by this. As things stand now, there isn't going to be a 2020 season, and more and more of us are becoming resigned to that.

We're also cursing time, which is the culprit.

Too much of it, see, has passed since the 1994 strike that wiped out half the season and the World Series. It's been 26 years since that lost summer, and half the current players weren't even alive then. They don't remember how it wrecked the game for five years. And the owners don't care, because few of them are baseball people; the game is just a line on the investment ledger to them.

To hell with 'em. To hell with all of 'em.