“It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call ‘The Twilight Zone’”.  

Intro to the U.S. television series that ran from October 1959 through June 1964.

Baseball is back! Maybe.  For a while.  Sort of.  Depends on how you look at it.  

I watched a couple of “spring” (a late July spring) training games last night. I saw an empty Fenway Park and I saw a Dodger Stadium with cardboard figures behind home plate. 

For a person of my age, it reminded me of an episode of the old television series, “The Twilight Zone”.  I can see it now, in its glorious, intensifying black and white.  A baseball fan has been in a coma for 6 months and comes out of it and wanders into a ballpark. 

There are cardboard people sitting in Dodger Stadium behind home plate, the only humans in sight being the players and umpires on the field. Or it is Fenway Park, a gathering place for New England families since 1912, with no one in the stands. Not a soul. A game on the field but no fans. The fan can hear the crack of the bat and the spitting of sunflower seeds, but otherwise just some strange, artificial humming in the background, the 2020 baseball version of canned laughter.

At first the fan conjures up wonderful memories of his youth, a green pastoral field in the middle of a teeming city, cheering fans, vendors hawking their wares. Shocked by what he sees, the nothingness, just as in the old Twilight Zone episodes he still thinks there is some normalcy here, somewhere. He is unwilling to accept this “new normal”, this new reality.  So he decides to wander under the stands and get a “dog” and a beer, like he has done since his college days. To clear his head and get back to the world he had left. 

So our guy walks down the tunnel out of the lovely bowl surrounding the lush green field, into the area where they sell all varieties of food and drink,  Dodger Dogs or Fenway Franks, sushi or tacos, assorted beers and soda. Peanuts  and crackerjack of course. He expects to be met with that special ballpark smell of stale beer and popcorn and steaming franks and cotton candy. He expects a sea of humanity, guys and girls laughing, shoving toward the fronts of lines to make their purchases and get back to their seats. 

Instead, instead, our fan is met with more emptiness. The food stands, the beer stands, the souvenir stands are all boarded up. There are no fans, no noise, no excitement. No cries of “beer here”. This is the classic Twilight Zone moment, when our fan realizes, hey, this isn’t the world I left 6 months ago!  He is alone. 

Our fan then thinks to himself, hey, this is late July – this ballpark should be full. There should be college kids and old folks making their summer livings by working at the ballpark. The bars and restaurants around the park should be brimming with happy people.  The Orioles should already have been eliminated from the pennant race. A couple of managers should already have been fired and the Yanks and the Sox should already have had a couple of beanball wars. 

Our fan by now has accepted that this is not the world he had left. But he decides to give it one more chance. He leaves the desolate cavern of the area beneath the stands and goes back up the tunnel to the field. Once again he is shocked to see no one watching this grand old game being played on the field, seeing an empty arena at Fenway or the back of cardboard cut-out figures at Dodger Stadium. He hears the piped in crowd noise again, glimpses a few bystanders finally, wearing masks, standing far apart from each other. This only enhances the fear and loathing of the world that he is now living in. 

But our fan decides to stay  for a while, waiting to hear if they play Take Me Out to the Ball Game during the 7th inning stretch, but then remembers that these cardboard fans are probably not going to rise from their seats.  But who knows?  Who knows in this world?  

And he wonders if Fenway will reverberate with the strains of Sweet Caroline after the top of the 8th, with the normal accompaniment of drunken fans screaming “so good, so good, so good”.  But then what does it matter?  No one is there.  A tree in the woods?  

So yes, baseball is back. Thank goodness. It has been the background music of every summer of my life, give or take a labor strike or two. The 2020 version is better than nothing. But right now it seems more suited for an episode of the Twilight  Zone.  Rod Serling would love it.