The strangeness of it all

They played a baseball game at Citi Field in New York last night, but it was not like any baseball game the Babe would have recognized. There were no spectators. Occasional scratchy crowd noise was piped in. The players wore masks, and party tents were employed as dugouts.

But I'm just gettin' to the weird part, as Mac Davis' character once said in "North Dallas Forty."

The weird part was, there was a small section of spectators behind home plate. Except they weren't real spectators.

They were cardboard cutouts of spectators.

The Bastard Plague has thrown a lot of mind-altering curveballs at us these past five months or so. But this might have been the melted-clock, tilted-landscape, Picasso/Dali/Edward Hopper moment of them all.

Now, the Yankees and Mets were just playing a dry run, so who knows if this is what real baseball is going to look like. Certainly it's going to be a good Aaron Judge poke from normal; for one thing, Canada has closed its borders to the crazy Americans and decreed the Blue Jays will not be allowed to play in Toronto, which means they'll be the Buffalo Blue Jays or Tonawanda Blue Jays or some such thing.

So, yeah. It'll be ... different.

In which case I kinda like the cardboard cutout idea.

I mean, think of the possibilities. The Cubs could play in front of an entire "crowd" of Ernie Bankses. Jackie Robinson Day could actually be Jackie Robinson Day. Max Scherzer could come set in some visiting ballpark, stare in at the hitter and see an entire section of Max Scherzers staring back at him.

Would that freak a guy out or what? Talk about a home-field advantage.

And the reverse would be true, of course. How pumped would Kris Bryant get if he came to the plate and saw a whole pile of Kris Bryants in the seats behind homeplate? What sort of powerful juju would there be if the Babe, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and the Mick were occupying the seats behind home in Yankee Stadium?

And when the Red Sox came to town?

You fill those seats with dozens of Bucky (Bleeping) Dents. Of course.

I like it. I like it a lot.