The Soundless Summer

 Roger Angell, in referring to the 1981 baseball strike, called it the Soundless Summer. 2020, in most ways, is but a variant on that theme.

Our bellies do not burn as in seasons past. The smell of the game does not float in the air. It is as though the sport itself is disembodied, hovering somewhere out of reach, visible yet merely an abstraction.

The stands that house the joy, the anguish, the long periods where we are allowed to focus on those around us, on the conversations we overhear, these now lay fallow, empty and silent. We are, above all else, a community. We fans revel in each other. We share our stories. We share our passions. We don't merely watch this game of baseball. We live it. Together.

In this strangest of summers we take in this sport alone. This has been an all encompassing pandemic of mind as well as body. We watch baseball in isolation. There is no companionship, no one to nod in agreement at our most profound comments, to ridicule our false prognostications, to share in the flow of this sport coursing through our collective veins.

What we now see are cardboard cutouts  masquerading as us sitting in our seats. What we hear are the piped in sounds manufactured not by us but captured in some studio. What we witness is not a reality but a shadow of a resemblance of one.

And thus the game loses so much of its intensity. Baseball, beyond all other sports, relies on it's eyes, it's ears, and beyond all else, it's vocal chords, to provide it's full meaning. For in an undertaking with long moments that can very closely approach ennui, we the fans must fill in the gaps. And cardboard cutouts fall gravely short of accomplishing that goal.

So, Mr. Angell, nearly four decades after you wrote of a Soundless Summer, I would suggest that we are witnessing a similar phenomenon. For we have discovered that even as the players play, baseball has no voice if we are not there to hear it.