Friday BP: Talking sports in a sportless world

Yesterday morning I published an article about how the San Francisco Giants had named Johnny Cueto their starter for their March 26 opening day matchup against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

A few hours later I penned an article about how that game wouldn’t be occurring. Not on that date, at any rate.

MLB officially suspended Spring Training on Thursday, as well as the first two weeks of the season at the very minimum. The NBA also suspended their season. So did the NHL and MLS. March Madness is canceled, as are other currently ongoing NCAA sports. Tennis is sidelined. Golf has halted. Formula 1’s opening weekend is no more.

And so on and so forth.

There are, of course, far more pressing matters right now than sports. There always are, even if sports so often serve as a necessary release valve from those matters. It’s hard to bemoan the temporary loss of sports without feeling a little guilty, given the severity of the coronavirus outbreak.

And yet, sports matter, especially in that role. And for now, they’re gone.

So we move forward. We all have our different plans, priorities, and ideas to both confront a pandemic, and fill the void left by the removal of sports.

My plan? Self-isolate, catch up on all the books I’ve been meaning to read but that stay on the shelf because basketball or baseball is on, cook, resume learning languages, and clean/organize my apartment. That’s what I’ll be doing with my free time that’s been cleared up by losing sports and avoiding social settings.

It’s not all free time, though. I still have a job to do, and much of that job is writing articles here, for all of you.

Articles about a baseball team that likely won’t do anything baseball related for at least a month.

This is the quietest baseball can be. The season has games and entertainment. The offseason has transactions and speculation. Spring Training has all four.

Right now we have nothing. Sure, technically the Giants could probably agree to a deal with Yasiel Puig, but we’re not going to see any roster moves. There won’t be any waiver claims or reassignments. We don’t have a fifth starter battle or closer battle to watch and dissect.

We’re holistically devoid of baseball.

I’ll find things to write about, and some of them will even be more worthwhile than what I would have fallen into were operations proceeding as normal. But many of the articles that would normally be filling this space this time of year cannot, or should not be written. So we’re going to move in some new directions, because baseball may be on hiatus, but talking about it is not.

Which leads me to a question: What do you want? I’m not trying to be lazy and crowdsource ideas, though I’m not not trying to do that either.

But we have a baseball-less month and I intend to fill it with content. What would you like the content to be? We have a blank canvass, and I’ll throw a lot of paint at it. If there are some specific colors the community is hoping to see, let me know. We can go the serious route with roster breakdowns. The silly route with funny articles. The sentimental route with old games - the Giants played a few good ones in recent years.

It all depends on the temperature of the room, which hopefully you can help me figure out. Sports may be on hold, but the McCovey Chronicles community is not.