Baseball's back, and the Indians through last Thursday, July 30, were off to a 5-2 start, mostly due to a stellar rotation of young starting pitchers.
After months of being inside, or at least limited in our movements, is this the one nice thing 2020 will allow us to have?
Maybe not.
Already, a big COVID-19 outbreak among players and staff of the Miami Marlins forced cancellations of some of their games, creating a cascade of teams affected by the fallout of positive tests. And on Friday morning, July 31, the St. Louis Cardinals had two of their players test positive, resulting in Major League Baseball postponing that afternoon's game at the Milwaukee Brewers. The Cardinals had last played Wednesday, July 29, at the Minnesota Twins — the Indians' weekend opponent and presumed strongest rival in the AL Central.
Baseball's curtailed season was supposed to feature each team playing 60 games, but that goal, just a week into the season, looks almost impossible to achieve.
You don't have to be deeply attached to "national pastime" nostalgia to appreciate the tiny bit of normalcy baseball brings back to cities, even with empty stadiums. Turning on the TV or the radio for the game is deeply pleasurable. It's particularly so for Indians fans eager to see a World Series winner — and with a team that plausibly could do it.
Perhaps baseball will be able to figure out a way to complete a safe season. We hope so. But so far, it's another case of the realities of 2020 continuing to upend normal life. And reminding us, in the escapist realm of professional sports rather than in the more serious context of 150,000-plus lives lost, of the country's failure to contain the virus.
A lot of Republican politicians — including, and maybe particularly, President Donald Trump — must be thinking to themselves these days, "We'll always have Cleveland."
August is typically the most boring and least newsy month of the year, but it was to have gotten a jolt in 2020 from the political parties' conventions. If you were in Cleveland during summer 2016, when the Republican National Convention came to town, you remember the energy the event created and the national attention it generated for the city and the organizers who handled it so deftly.
But this year is like no other, and Cleveland's big convention four years ago might mark the end of an era.
The coronavirus has scrambled everything, including the plans of Democrats to gather in Milwaukee on Aug. 17-20, and Republicans to go to Charlotte (later switched to Jacksonville, a venue change that was scratched) on Aug. 24-27. There still will be something labeled a "convention" for both parties, but events will be virtual. The filled bars and restaurants, active street vendors, peaceful protests and more that marked the Cleveland convention will not exist this time around.
It's entirely possible this upsetting of political tradition will serve the country well. Perhaps streamlined, online-only convention events will put an emphasis on what the country needs — a focus on our significant economic, social and health problems — rather than on political figures. Companies have learned to get creative on Zoom and other platforms to change the way they work and become more efficient. Can political parties do the same?
Cleveland, meanwhile, gets a place in the spotlight again when Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic host the first debate between Trump and the Democrats' presumed nominee, Joe Biden, on Sept. 29 on their Health Education Campus. Hosting duties were to have been handled by the University of Notre Dame, which bowed out.
It's unlikely there will be an audience at the debate, and given the speed at which the virus situation is changing, Case and the Clinic will need to be nimble to handle health matters on top of the normal logistical concerns of a high-stakes political forum. One thing is certain: People will watch. Organizers expect at least 100 million to tune in for the event. And as in 2016, the eyes of the nation will be on Cleveland.
"ball" - Google News
August 02, 2020 at 03:00PM
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Crain's editorial: Play ball? - Crain's Cleveland Business
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