The Silence of No Sports

The arenas and stadiums are all quiet today and the spring training parks are silent. The NCAA tournament brackets are empty and blank on what would have been the selection Sunday.

It’s so serene out there that when you step outside, no matter where you live, you can’t hear Dick Vitale howling about diaper dandies and  dipsy-doo dunks.

In a time when the world has gone crazy with fear of an unseen Covid-19 coronavirus, the silence is deafening in the world of sports.

It makes for the clack of the APBA dice to be all the more noticeable. No games on television or in the stadiums? There are still sports going on at my house, albeit it the 1947 baseball replay. On Thursday, a day in Arkansas when everyone rushed the stores and bought cleaner and handy wipes and toilet paper and it made the fall of Saigon look like a summer picnic, I returned from my local store, frazzled. I calmed down, rolling a handful of games that included the Brooklyn Dodgers’ 12^th win in a row to put them in first, half a game ahead of St. Louis.

Therein lies one of the attractions of this game we’ve played since we were kids. There is insulation to it all. The bad of the world doesn’t affect the good of the game. Games cancelled due to virus? Not in our replays. There are no strikes, no stoppage of play. APBA players can play the 1994 baseball season to its fullest and even have a World Series if they choose, foregoing the real life stoppage of play and the cancellation of the fall classic. In my own replay of 1981, I ignored the mid-season strike and played a full season to see what happened.  When I do the 1972 replay, I won’t acknowledge the strike that began that actual campaign.

There are no major injuries if we don’t want our players hurt. When I did the 1925 season, Babe Ruth was healthy, unlike in real life when he played only 98 games that year due to his medical "ailment" of anything from kidney stones to syphilis, depending upon who was asking. I figured I paid for the season, I’ll use all the cards if I want.

We don’t have to have goofy commissioners, no bench clearing brawls, no steroids. It may sound like a Pollyanna type atmosphere, but we have the chance to keep a season pristine and clean with APBA. I’m tired of all the bad; APBA showcases the good.

Yesterday and today, at my weekend job at an assisted living facility, I had to screen all visitors and take their temperatures to ensure we weren’t letting any viruses inside. It became depressing. I brought my APBA notebook to work and during breaks set my daily schedules and even jotted down starting lineups for a week of upcoming games. By Sunday evening, after I had scanned the temperatures of more than 140 people, the depression of what’s going on was setting in. I look forward to escaping later tonight with a few games.  I have the New York Giants up soon; it’ll be fun to see the big bats of Mize, Marshall, Thompson and Cooper come alive.

Tomorrow, I'll head to my job with the local prosecutor. Courts are closed, I was told; a murder trial set for Tuesday has been postponed. I don't know if I'll be working or at home next week. The uncertainty is alarming at a time when rumors are rampant and truth is one of the first casualties, as they say.

So, we have to trudge through all this weirdness and confusion of our times. It’s all we can do. But in the silence that’s created by the vacuum of no sports, roll more APBA games. Use that yellow, plastic dice roller to make the ivory dice sound louder. It may be an irresponsible escape, but it’s a welcome one.