I'm not supposed to be at the road office and I'm damn sure not supposed to be bummed out about the state of baseball, the minors to be specific, and our country in general.
I'm supposed to be hanging out with my buddies after a day of baseball in Myrtle Beach and Charleston with three days to go in the official kickoff to the end of the downtime-I.E- Non-Baseball season and instead I'm sitting at work, bored, depressed, and generally discouraged about more than missing a trip.
Reality has set in and it looks to me that we will not have minor league baseball or live in-person baseball at all this season.
While this means more money for other things and less time spent on the road, the loss is the time with my friends and around the game that you can't get back.
And the final irony is this- I'm not sure what things will be like when baseball does come back.
A sport that even before Covid-19 that was in the middle of a campaign to lessen their player's contact with its fans will likely use Covid-19 as an excuse to go even further in moving their stars away.
Covid-19 makes sense for the time being to be very safe, but I have the feeling that things have changed for good with the players.
Place aside the drawn royal flush for Rob Manfred to get away with his planned demolition of the minors and think of this- Imagine a baseball world without players interacting with season ticket holders, autograph collectors, franchises not wanting their players to stay with host families, and players being separated by netting for now (I'm convinced that eventually the netting around the field will be changed to fiberglass similar to hockey) for a different fan experience at whatever level you watch baseball at.
I'm already trying to plan a summer without baseball and it's likely to be a summer without traveling as well.
That's unfortunate because I'd be more than willing to travel without baseball, but unless I'm surprised, it appears to be a local-bound summer.
While I'm struggling with so many things that we all are dealing with right now, I'm finding things to do, still have that metal detector to use, and playing a lot of games, which I'll update later this week.
While I'm disappointed about my summer travels going down the drain, I'm even dismayed about the current state of the political discourse.
I see so many people on the left and the right each thinking that the other controls the country that it's sad to see a lack of common ground.
Left-leaning people that won't vote for Joe Biden because their guy (Bernie Sanders) lost and there is no difference between Biden and the President and the right side of the crowd believing that Biden is no different than Sanders is both ridiculous and a non-starter.
It's saddening to see our country so splintered and unwilling to work together even on the most important topics, although the first stimulus did show some cooperation for a need that even the most fervent partisan couldn't be against.
I'll be very interested in seeing if this can be repeated for the next wave of stimulus packages, which is almost surely going to be repeated in the summer- if not exceeded.
I've been critical of the President and feel that my initial assessment of his character has proven to be correct, but I'm not rooting against him right now as so many are.
I'd much rather see the same folks put their energy into defeating him in a fair election in November rather than root for him to fail currently.
I've never understood the saying "not my President".
Win or lose, the winner is our President for four years and while we don't have to agree with policies, we should hope for the best.
Today's not a great day considering what I'd rather be doing, but there are so many people around that are far worse than me and my family are and it's hard to be too whiny when you think of others.
Here is hoping that that 2021 is much better than 2020 because the standard doesn't seem to be too hard to match.
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