With baseball almost upon us, trying to read the good into everything

Let me take you back to a time when COVID-19 was far back in our minds, when all we seemed to care about was the Cubs’ pitching depth and the White Sox’ playoff chances. Let’s call that magical time “early to mid-March.’’

There we were, eagerly awaiting the baseball season, our excitement for it as glossy as the material the Sun-Times’ preview magazine was being printed on. Oh how our prose flowed in that issue!

Then that pandemic thing happened.

And our wonderful magazine, full of hope and springtime regeneration, an ode to the national pastime, took to its sick bed. It was supposed to run the Sunday before Opening Day, but baseball, like seemingly everything else, shut down in mid-March because of the virus. No Cubs, no Sox, just a lot of emptiness.

In our naivete, we thought of it as an extended rain delay. Maybe the coronavirus would push back the season a couple weeks, perhaps a month.

Now it’s nearing mid-July, baseball appears to be on its way back and Sun-Times readers are finally getting the magazine that was printed in March. A preprinted insert is not like an opponent’s home run ball at Wrigley Field. You can’t throw it back to the printer once ink has hit paper. That’s a long way of explaining why you have a magazine that has absolutely no mention of COVID-19. Lots of bats and balls, no nasal swabs and quarantines.

I think of the magazine as a metaphor. We’re in a strange time, the strangest time for many of us, when everything feels off and nothing feels settled. A time when a newspaper’s baseball magazine thinks that David Ross’ debut as Cubs manager is the most important thing in the world. Strange, but kind of nice, too. We were so innocent back then.

Enjoy the magazine. It remains to be seen how many sporting events you’ll get to enjoy.

The reduced, 60-game baseball season starts in two weeks but might not be around in a month, thanks to a virus that doesn’t, as a manager might say, have any quit in it. The NBA, meanwhile, has created a protective bubble in Florida in an effort to keep out the disease, meaning a pinprick could end its season before it begins. College football is on similar precarious footing, and the NFL, although marching determinedly toward its season, can’t escape the fact that its sport is based on the opposite of social distancing. COVID-19 can’t legislate tackling out of the game, can it?

Baseball umpire Joe West, the one blue man group member who won’t shut up, recently said that the death total attributed to the coronavirus in the United States (135,000) is actually much lower. He based this on his years of sweeping off home plate. The sad part is that, at 67, West is in the age group most at risk for the disease. Managers, coaches, umpires, referees and the parents and grandparents of players should be the biggest worry about any return to professional sports. That’s not to lessen the concern about the athletes themselves. It’s to point out that the tragedy around the corner probably isn’t the chance of a team running out of healthy players; it’s the possibility of an older coach or umpire getting seriously ill.

If it all seems precarious and weird, it’s because it is. Major League Baseball isn’t allowing fans in ballparks for the foreseeable future. Some teams will use cardboard cutouts of fans in the stands, and fake crowd noise will be piped in.

Every day seems to bring another reminder of how big the challenges are for sports to be played this year. Every day seems to introduce a reduction of some kind. One day, the Ivy League announces it’s shutting down all sports for the fall. Another day, the Big Ten says its teams will play only conference games in the fall.

Wanting something to happen doesn’t mean it will. But for now, let’s pretend it will. Let’s think about the good stuff that comes with real games being played. The athleticism. The strategy. The fun. And let’s hope against hope that things go without a hitch, that the people involved stay healthy, especially those most at risk of contracting the virus.

The White Sox are young and should be exciting. The Cubs are older and looking to prove that they still have the talent to be a contender. It’s OK to think these thoroughly unimportant thoughts in the middle of a pandemic. Or, as our baseball magazine puts it, “What pandemic?”