Of course, in a weird way, baseball then becomes the sport in line to be the first to hold a fairly normal season. Yes, the NFL somehow got through the 2020 season with each team playing 16 games, but there was a mix of some with crowds some without. There were games on every day of the week. It wns't anything close to 'normal.' This baseball season doesn't have full crowds (the Rangers excluded), but the lightly attended games to seem more real. It all seems more 'normal.' Baseball has long been mythologized as the sport of rebirth, particularly the poeticism that is Spring Training. Well, in many ways for US sports as a whole it is the rebirth.
What really did it for me was watching parts of the Astros first series in Oakland. As many will remember, the Astros were exposed as having cheated after the 2019 season. They were instantly, fairly, turned into villains. The whole MLB world wanted a shot at them.... and they didn't get it. The Astros played the 2021 season in front of empty stadiums. Fans had to wait - and they did but didn't lose a bit of their fire.
That first series in Oakland featured every Astros player getting mercilessly booed, but specifically those seen as at the center of it all: Altuve, Bregman, Correa. There were people banging trash cans. In LA for their series against the Angels, there was more of the same. It won't stop all year. It's the first sign from a spectator perspective of us reaching our equilibrium again.
And the weird part: The Astros are feeding off of it, going 5-1 on the road against in theory the two teams with the best shot of taking the AL West title. Their offense was great. The batters that were booed on end performed great. If anything, the Astros were missing out on playing to empty stadiums last year - a season where all the top batters had down years.
The whole league though just seems to be in a state of joyous relief. All over some amount of fans are allowed in. Given baseball is a sport that often plays to less than full stadiums, it didn't even seem all that weird.
The world is on the path back to "normal". Europe seems to be a mess, but the US is going through a strong vaccine roll-out. As places like Israel show, after you get most of the elderly vaccinated you can treat Covid like a flu in that it won't be a risk to overwhelming the health systems. We are on that track, to the point by the end of hte MLB season it is more likely than not we have full stadiums. Baseball should get the first crack at running a fully "normal" campaign, and its the perfect sport to do so. I just hope that the Astros and their re-revenge tour is there to see it through.
