As the coronavirus pandemic continues to make its way around the United States, sports fan can only dream of a day when social distancing is a memory and sports are once again a daily part of the national landscape.
“To me, right now, it looks like we would hopefully get started mid-June at the earliest, perhaps even at the All-Star break,” longtime baseball voice Dick Bremer said on The DA Show, when asked when the 2020 MLB regular season might begin. “The important thing is everybody needs to do what they can to stay safe so we can get through to the other side of all this horror that we’re living in. But I imagine a world out there where we’re going to start playing games but there’s not going to be any fans in the stands. Maybe that would be the prudent thing to do.
“But who among us, right now, would love to see any live sporting event on TV, whether it’s the NBA, NCAA basketball [or something else]?” Bremer continued. “Anything that would be put on TV, even if there weren’t any fans there, I think the sports fans among us would love to see that happen – and we’ll hope that it happens sooner rather than later. I know there are larger issues, certainly, but there’s a big cavity in our society when sports aren’t playing – for the participants and the spectators.”
Bremer, the author of “Game Used: My Life in Stitches with the Minnesota Twins,” remembers how baseball helped heal a nation in the aftermath of September 11.
“I know for a fact that just having the game played again after the 9/11 attacks was a fortifying thing for our country, just to see some signs of normalcy returning,” he said. “We’ll hope that happens with sports events and restaurants and everything here sooner rather than later.”