Pitch in the dirt.

My thoughts on Thursday: 

Meh, I dunno. 

I've really missed baseball this year, I confess, although I manage to wrest the remote control away for the length of a whole game very infrequently. Quite often, if I wish to be social, I wind up following it on my laptop while Dr. Pimple Popper or something provides televised entertainment.

Even so, I've missed it, but I've gotten used to its being away. We could have skipped this year, and I'm rather surprised we didn't. 

Sixty games, DH in the National League, no one in the stands, extra innings start with a guy on second? It's so weirdly different from regular years that I wonder that the stats would even count (although they have in strike-shortened seasons, so there's that). (And I'm certain this is the way the National League has finally found to smuggle in the designated hitter against the will of its fans; it'll be there in 2021 too, is my guess.) 

Is a season 102 games short of normal even a season? As my mechanic points out, sixty games in most teams are just finding their feet.

Then again, anything that even nears normalcy at this point has to be welcome. And maybe the ridiculously short season will give teams that barely ever get a shot at the postseason a chance, if they get off to a quick start. Who knows? This could be the year the beloved Mets break the schneid. Hell, it might even see the Padres win the Series!

Then again again, it looks like the anti-Americanism that is poisoning the National Football League is creeping into Major League Baseball as well. While it's unlikely they'll broadcast or perhaps even play the National Anthem in from of empty ballparks, they're going to find ways to stick it in fans' faces all the same. And there's not much of that I can take.

So I guess I'll see how it goes. Three against the Braves, then four against Boston, because the leagues don't really matter anymore anyway, so why not plunge right in. I could be learning the violin or training for a marathon with the time I waste on this stuff, really I could!

(Not really.)

My thoughts on Friday:

Well, they did it. Both the Yankees and Nationals took the knee before the National Anthem last night on the season's first game -- the two teams with the most patriotic names. They wore BLM shirts at batting practice. They don't seem to know or care that BLM is an avowed Marxist organization, or that their actions are a thumb in the eye to the country that made every one of them rich. It's skin-suit time again.

To hell with them. I honestly, truly hope they all go broke.

UPDATE: I was just (6:42 pm) informed that the Mets and Braves all stood respectfully for the National Anthem tonight. So I'm softening my opinion but I'm reserving judgment.