Fans Plan, Manfred Laughs

Counterfactually, the Mets are in West Palm Beach today playing the Nationals. It’s not much of a counterfactual to the reality we live in to conclude the Mets would be busy training their spring away a little south of St. Lucie given that the Mets sent out a preliminary Spring Training schedule last August marking FITTEAM Ballpark of the Palm Beaches as their planned whereabouts for March 2, 2022. The same preliminary schedule indicated the Mets were to have played every day since this past Saturday, meaning we would’ve seen them on television at least once; we might’ve heard them on radio; and we would’ve had a satisfying visual, aural and/or anecdotal glimpse of them taking on, for practice purposes, each of their Treasure Coast neighbors.

And we’d be growing sick of the whole thing after five games of the Grapefruit League slate because the Mets would have already been officially preparing for the 2022 season for about two weeks. Pitchers & Catchers & Third Basemen-Outfielders & everybody else would have reported; we’d have all praised their arrival to the highest heavens; and the practices prior to the practice games, too, would have lost their novelty after approximately five days.

Which doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have appreciated the whole Sunshine State spectacle despite its apparent pointlessness, for the point is baked in. By the second day of March — today — we would have had the routine of baseball hammered into us and therefore be set for the year ahead. The key to Spring Training is the repetition of Spring Training, in which weeks and weeks of mostly nothing have to happen in order to prepare us for six months that we collectively concur will be something. That’s what we’re in it for every Spring. We put up with Spring so we can be rewarded with summer and, if we’re lucky, fall.

Yeah, right.

Right now, we’re putting up with literal nothingness where Major League Baseball is concerned and we will be for the foreseeable future…though only if we feel ourselves putting up with it. Personally, I feel only a little put out by the news that The Lockout has clamped into institutionality. I would, like any baseball fan, prefer Spring Training to have magically appeared this February and March the way it magically appears every February and March, smoothing the path to Opening Day and the 161 games that, by natural law, are supposed to follow. Instead, The Lockout is the new routine. The owners of the thirty MLB clubs have locked out the players and decided to keep them locked out. Simultaneously, they are locking us out of our previously precious pointless routine and they’ve now confirmed they’ll lock us out of at least the first two series of our season.

Or their season. They view it as their ball. They’ve taken it and gone home. They don’t seem particularly upset about it. Rob Manfred couldn’t be bothered to suppress a grin in announcing the indefinite continuation of The Lockout. At least Bud Selig would have managed to look morose on the heels of frenzied negotiations that ultimately went nowhere. We can either stand around outside the proverbial gates of the Citi Fields of the mind and wonder wistfully when somebody will come along to open the ballpark for us, or we can think about something else. The Lockout makes you shrug. It is designed to make you shrug.

By instinct, I miss Spring Training. I will miss Opening Day for the same reason. I will miss the unfurling of the routine. Maybe the void the owners of the thirty MLB clubs and their hired commissioner have created will grow to a size that will envelop my emotions, and the lack of baseball will get to me and get to me bad. But it hasn’t really happened this time around. I guess I have other things to think about. I guess we all do. The so-called stewards of the sport don’t seem to care if we care, so why should we care? Even my instinct is shrugging.

I still love baseball, by instinct. Instinct carries us through March every March. Until this one. In the counterfactual universe of what we’ve come to routinely expect Spring Training to be, I’d be savoring our March maneuvers — Mets at Nationals today; Marlins at Mets tomorrow; then a weekend versus more Nationals and more Marlins — even as I was growing sick of them. That universe, however, presently sits light years from reality. The Lockout is what MLB has become in reality. MLB can keep its reality.

Call me when the gates reopen. I won’t be standing by.