Box(ed) joy

Opening Day for baseball yesterday in our strange Season of the Bastard Plague, and there were fake fans behind homeplate and fake crowd noise and, who knows, maybe even the fake aroma of popcorn and hotdogs. Oh, and players sharing hand sanitizer, which wasn't fake.

("Thanks, Anthony Rizzo!" -- Orlando Arcia)

("No problem, dude!" -- Rizzo)

Strangeness cubed. And something comfortably familiar, too, the way a game that has changed little in 160 years is comfortably familiar, its rhythms as eternal as sunlight and green grass and the way dust hangs briefly in the thick summer air when a man kicks it up sliding into second.

There was the ball jumping off Rizzo's bat in Wrigley Field, the big smack in a 3-0 Cubs win.

There was the ball dancing around flailing sticks in Cleveland, where Shane Bieber struck out 14 Royals in a 2-0 Indians win.

There was, alas, the Blob's crummy Pittsburgh Pirates falling 5-4 to the Evil Cardinals in St. Louis, speaking of rhythms eternal.

Best of all, though, were the small things, the things you never realize you missed until they come back. A cold beer and the lolling murmur of a baseball game on the radio in the slow-cooling twilight. The tock of a well-struck ball. Getting up in the morning, putting the coffee on and finding those old, old American hieroglyphics awaiting you: The boxscore.

The boxscore for my crummy Pirates this morning tells me  J. Musgrove took the loss on the bump, striking out seven and walking three while surrendering two homers in 5 2/3 innings. It tells me C. Moran went 2-for-4 with two runs and J. Osuna went 2-for-4 with two RBI and J. Bell went 1-for-4 and scored two runs.

It tells me K. Newman made a throwing error. That J. Flaherty got the W for the Evil Cardinals. That for my crummy Pirates, J.  Stallings had a GIDP (Ground Into Double Play), and the Team RISP (Runners In Scoring Position) was 3-for-7, and the Team LOB (Left On Base) was four.

Mostly it told me the Pirates are 0-1 and now the pressure's off to go 60-0 in this Reader's Digest Condensed season. So they got that goin' for 'em.

It also told me this: That something normal -- something so everyday we barely notice it unless it isn't there -- has at last returned to the world.

Take that, 2020.