I wondered yesterday (while tending a pile of burning brush) when the CCBL would make the tough call to cancel this summer’s baseball season. It seemed inevitable, and now it’s official: no Kettleers this summer.
For a lot of players at the top of their game, this has been a year of lost opportunities, the kind of year for an athlete with pro ambitions that can’t be shrugged off as a bye. For some, this summer was going to be their best chance to show the pro scouts what they could do. Now they will continue to workout on their own, trying to stay in shape without a team like every athlete in the world who has been benched by COVID. Wondering like the rest of us when the bleachers will reopen and the ump will yell “play ball!”
The Olympic athletes who have spent four years preparing for Tokyo, the marathoners who planned to run Boston, my niece Allison’s volleyball team and my nephew Ted’s soccer season are all on hold, paused, all held up by the big viral rain delay.
These are the days that history will remember with asterixes and footnotes. The year of suspensions and cancellations. The year nothing was played. The kind of disclaimer that Ted Williams was tagged with because of his service as a Marine pilot in WW II and Korea, the “what-if” speculation of what he might have achieved if war hadn’t cancelled the game.
My condolences to the volunteers that make the Cape Cod Baseball League such a gem, to the Cotuit Athletic Association (who just broke ground on new visitor stands), Coach Mike Roberts, his staff and all the college players we won’t get to meet and welcome to the village in the summer of 2020.
