San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Hope shines eternal for Giants, A’s, return to normalcy.
Baseball is finally returning. And I say because I don’t really count last year’s weird little stub of a season.
Oh, the 2020 season will go into the record books. History will tell you that Freddie Freeman and Jose Abreu won MVP awards, that Kevin Cash won the AL Manager of the Year — in a vote taken before he made one of the worst postseason decisions in history — and that the Dodgers, after more than three decades of futility, won another World Series.
All those things count. They’re all recorded for posterity. There are no asterisks.
But that wasn’t a real baseball season.
Hopefully, we’re about to get one.
A real baseball season is a companion. A comfort. It unfolds in a long, slow process from early rainouts in April showers to freezing October nights. It has a rhythm and a pace, a familiarity and a history, that doesn’t work right if it is radically changed.
That was the lesson from last season. Even though conventional wisdom would say that a lockeddown public would be more eager for baseball than ever, the reality didn’t exactly prove that. Nielsen changed how it tracked baseball ratings to include digital consumers, but their efforts were spotty.
The overall takeaway was that viewership, counting digital as well as conventional watching, was up in 2020 by an average of 4.2%. Viewership for the A’s and Giants significantly increased. But traditional television ratings were down because the audience being counted was fractured among various platforms.
And ratings were way down for the postseason, to record lows — again, something that seems counterintuitive given the lack of distractions.
This may be part of a bad historical trend for baseball. Or it may be due to something I’ve written about before: We all gained perspective last year and sports was largely put in its correct place, lower on the priority schedule. Dealing with a pandemic and a politically fractured country, particularly in the tense weeks running up to the election, may have meant consumers simply didn’t have the bandwidth to kick back and enjoy baseball.
Overall, what baseball gave us was a weird, unfamiliar season. MLB shoehorned in 60 games even though it didn’t seem particularly wise. Every day and every game were fraught with tension about COVID19 protocols, stoppages and postponements, and the entire league simmered with underlying labor friction. Social protests canceled games. Here on the West Coast, smoke from fires upended the schedule.
The entire nineweek seasonplusplayoffs felt rushed and stressful.
For football, that’s OK. It’s a frenetic, tense sport at all times. For baseball? That’s not the right vibe.
Now baseball is attempting a normal 162game season. Though there may be more stops and starts due to COVID19 protocols, there should be fewer, as players are now familiar with the routine and expectations, and the numbers of vaccinated team members should increase dramatically in the early months of the season.
Fans will be allowed back into ballparks, in restricted capacity in most cities, but with the assumption those numbers will increase as the season continues unless there is another surge. (Please be smart.)
The involvement of the customer will also be a welcome return to normalcy, both for those who choose to go to games and those watching or listening at home. Baseball fans may not be as raucous as football crowds or as loud as those at an indoor basketball arena, but the murmur of the crowd is an important backdrop at every game. The hum as the pitcher sets, the chants from various corners of the crowd, the cry of the vendors.
The fake noise pumped into games and broadcasts last year couldn’t replicate those intimate sounds. In fact, the digitally created noise and cardboard cutouts of fans may have been offputting to many — just a reminder of what couldn’t be.
For the A’s and the Giants, there will be nonpandemic plots and story lines that will unspool as the season wears on.
For the Giants, the sense of farewell may loom over everything. Could this be the last season in San Francisco for Buster Posey, Brandon Crawford and Brandon Belt, players who have been summer companions for most of the past decade? Will the young faces we glimpsed in last year’s manic rush of a season deliver? Will this season start a new era, or at least carry the true promise of one?
For the A’s, we will learn whether the team can build on the past two seasons of success and repeat as division winner. Can the A’s overcome the loss of a key leader like Marcus Semien? Matt Chapman will be back and healthy, and his every feat will be accompanied by the nagging fear that he could soon be gone, along with the rest of the A’s young talent, for the usual reasons.
For fans of either local team, there will be a sense of nostalgia, of potential endings and memories of past highlights, plus new beginnings and introductions and reasons for hope. And, if all goes right, we will watch the stories reveal themselves at a gentle pace, over the course of a season.
The way it is supposed to be. A real baseball season.