Major League Baseball returned to the airwaves – live! – this week. It was something I was looking forward to watching besides the fourth or fifth round of sitcoms, Red Sox or Celtics rewind shows, or another not so funny or exciting movie on TV. Guess I have to get into Netflix or Disney+ to order what I want to watch.

After watching a couple of innings of the New York Yankees and New York Mets “spring training” games on ESPN, with cardboard cutouts of fans’ faces placed in the stands behind the backstop – that’s the area behind the catcher and home plate umpire for you non-baseball fans – I tried to conjure up some excitement. It was live sports, for heaven’s sake. Get into it. But somehow, I never found any excitement.

I thought maybe it was the teams – never liked the Yankees and I last cheered for the Mets in 1969 – but it was more than that. Then I thought, maybe it was just that it was just a tune-up game for the shortened season with line-ups of unknown players trying to make the final roster, or that I wasn’t remembering that baseball games are, most of the time, slow. Not seeing or hearing cheering fans in the stands didn’t help, either.

Then it hit me. The last reason – baseball being a slow developing game – reminded me too much of our current situation with COVID-19. This pandemic is feeling like the longest game ever. I think the only time I stayed up after midnight for a baseball game was when the Red Sox were making their run at the 2004 championship and those two or three games against the Yankees in the American League championship series that lasted into the early morning. Now that was exciting.

So, what inning are we in with the pandemic? Nobody knows, that’s the frustrating thing. When it looks like we are winning the game, the virus gets worse (predicted). Is there an end in sight? No one knows.

Time to turn off the TV. Baseball isn’t doing it for me. Maybe the NBA or NFL will bring some excitement back.