Tongue tried

Sometimes your brain just gets itself a big ol' charlie horse. It happens.

So maybe it was just a cramp in the cerebral cortex that made Zach Greinke of the Cheatin' Astros say what he did the other day, which is not something any athlete wants to say when he wants to fly under the radar of public disdain. 

What he said was, he kinda likes playing in empty ballparks. Doesn't miss the fans at all. 'Cause, you know, who needs 'em?

"I mean, for me it's nice not having fans in the stands," he said, his tongue clearly getting away from him. "Because then there's no one there to talk to you and ask for autographs and want pictures and all that stuff. I don't like to do that stuff. It's nice not having them."

I don't know if any of his teammates were standing nearby when he said this. But no one came leaping in to slap a hand over his mouth, so I guess not.

Meanwhile, somewhere baseball commissioner Rob Manfred either spit out his coffee or knocked over the cup as he flew out of his chair screaming "WHAT THE HELL, GREINKE?!"

God knows baseball has enough headaches without a key player in one of its league championship series saying he could do without the fans. And God also knows the Cheatin' Astros were loathed enough already without it being one their key players who said that.

Although hardly anyone roots for the Cheatstros anymore anyway, so maybe Greinke was just trying to put a smiley face on his team's current reality.

Look. Every sport needs its fans, but maybe baseball most of all, because its fan demographic right now hovers somewhere between Rest Home and Tombstone. Shouting-at-clouds geezers like me may still go to the games because we cling to romantic and imperfect memory, but the kids coming up today don't even have that. 

Baseball to them is just three-and-a-half hours of boring -- and, besides, the World Series comes on too late for them to watch even if if they wanted to. So it's an uphill fight for baseball to sustain itself as America's Once-Upon-A-Pastime, and Greinke saying who needs the fans hardly makes the grade any less steep.

Fact is, baseball, as with any sport, became what it is because of the fans. They showed up, they liked what they saw, and they became obsessed with it to an unhealthy degree.

And then?

Well. And then they invented fantasy, of course.  

Maybe Greinke does prefer cardboard cutouts and piped-in sound to the real thing. But the rest of us just think it's weird and kind of sad, if not deeply so. No cardboard cutout kid is ever going to hit that bomb some Tampa Bay Ray just hit off the Zachster, after all. Or one of Jose Altuve's wild relay throws, for that matter.

And that's a shame. That's a hit baseball dearly cannot absorb, but has been compelled to like everyone else in this crazy 2020 reality. 

It already had a yeoman's task, making today's stratospherically wealthy players accessible and relevant to the average wage-slave fan. Having one of its stars go on television and say he likes being even less accessible only makes that task harder.

So what exactly WAS Zach Greinke thinking?

Actual working and inquiring minds want to know.