It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Springtime

I know that it’s hard to appreciate this when you consider that the middle of the country spent the last week battered by furious winter storms, but Wednesday was the first day that pitchers and catchers reported to Spring Training. Normally, that’s my favorite time of year. Spring Training brings the promise of longer, brighter days to come, and baseball is uniquely representative of impending warm weather.

This spring hits a little different.

We’re heading into the second spring of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is both starkly different from the Lost Spring of 2020, and yet disturbingly similar. Last year, we never imagined we’d be in this spot. We had only heard drips of information about this weird new illness in China, and as a collective we never thought it would touch us. This is America, after all, and pandemics are the stuff of Third World nations. Then it got here, and some of us were misguided in our belief that it was no big deal, like the flu, and would vanish on its own miraculously. Even the most pessimistic of us believed that we could shut down for 8-12 weeks, and we’d be back to normal just in time to go on summer vacation. It is a darkly humorous bit of understatement to say now—48 weeks, 28 million cases, and nearly a half-million bodies later—that we underestimated the severity of the disease and overestimated our collective ability to do what was necessary to combat it. Sadly, even though a vaccine has come out that we hope will save us all, things haven’t really changed all that much. I still encounter too many people, so disconnected from reality that they still doubt the illness, its severity, and the chaos left in its wake.

The COVID-19 pandemic has left nothing untouched. It has removed our ability to gather and socialize. We seldom go outside anymore and that has left us with far too much time to chase false leads down internet rabbit holes. The pronounced lack of anything better to do has given rise to experts sans expertise, and the ensuing conversations with these people lack the substance necessary to move us forward. We engage more fully in shouting matches with people whose only aim is to be contrary for the sake of their own entertainment.

However, there is good news. The vaccines seem to be working, and spring is coming.

We can look forward to a time of renewal and rebirth, and in preparation for the time when it’s safe to be around our neighbors and friends, we should remind ourselves that we can work together to dig ourselves out of the snow. We can huddle together for warmth instead of fighting fever-pitched battles. We can come together as a community and look out for one another, and that won’t sound so much like a hippie, commie agenda. The snow will melt and the air will warm, and hopefully we’ll have learned the necessary lessons from what seems like a year-long winter.

Of course, this is a post about spring. It’s hard to talk about spring without talking about baseball. In light of what’s going on in the wider world, I’ll keep it brief.

Yankees should win it all this year.