There will be no blankets on the hill at Eldredge Park. The fog will roll into Chatham, but it will not cut short any games. No donut burgers will be consumed at Red Wilson Field. “Hey, Hey Cotuit” will not echo through the trees outside Lowell Park’s fences. The lights from Doran Park will not be spotted from the Bourne Bridge.
The 2020 Cape Cod Baseball League season has been canceled. The announcement came Friday afternoon. It was a possibility as soon as the coronavirus pandemic really took hold, maybe even an inevitability, but it stung all the same.
Like so many things in this altered world, disappointment mixes with understanding and perspective. So many factors are working against summer leagues – players arriving from all over the country and staying with host families, stay-at-home orders, gathering size limits, sponsorship shortfalls, facility availability. The league made the right call. And in the big picture, when people are dying and sick, when people are losing jobs and businesses, of course sports take a back seat.
But the disappointment remains. You are permitted to feel all these things at once.
So many people will miss a Cape League summer. League officials whose reward for a year of hard work is a front-row seat for great baseball. Team officials and volunteers who put in so much time, all for the love of the game and the league. Managers and coaches who are fully aware that they have a dream job and enjoy every minute of it. Fans who pack the ballparks, pairing a perfect beach day with a perfect baseball night. Broadcasters, writers, interns who relish the best summer of their lives, just like their counterparts on the field.
And, of course, the players. A summer in the league is a chance many of them will have only once. They will miss out on testing themselves against the best, on showcasing their skills for the largest scouting contingent many of them will ever see. And they will miss the fun, the camaraderie, the simple joys of a season of baseball by the beach, all the things that add up to make it the best summer of their lives. That they’ve already lost their spring season makes it all even worse. I feel for them.
For me, it will be a strange summer. I don’t get to as many games as I used to these days, but I watch broadcasts most nights, stare at statistics and write the daily recaps here. I was planning to promote my new book, Summer Baseball Nation, at games this summer. And I was looking forward to bringing my 11-month-old daughter to her first game. Once upon a time, a Cape League game was my first taste of baseball. I was 6 months old.
I’ve already found in this spring without baseball, that the thing I miss the most is the drumbeat of the game. It is always there, this steady presence, almost every day, from April to October. It does not require your constant attention. Game 79 of 162 on a sunny summer Sunday afternoon is there if you want it.
In my world, the Cape League’s drumbeat is louder. I started Right Field Fog 13 years ago; the rhythms of the Cape League season are embedded in my summer consciousness by now. All of it is woven with memories of those perfect beach days and perfect baseball nights, even when I’m not there. I still look at a stat sheet with a hint of excitement, wondering where I’ll see these names again.
I reach a point every summer, usually in late July, when I get just a little bit tired of writing the daily recaps. Three weeks later or so, on the first morning without a game from the night before, I always feel a little lost, wishing I had a recap to write. That time of year, the summer sun hasn’t yet set, but it doesn’t feel quite the same. Real summer is behind us.
Many of us will feel a little lost this year. The sun will be warm. Maybe there will be baseball, somewhere. But real summer will be further behind and further ahead than ever.
We’ll be waiting for it.
