What to do in times of need.

Most things happen to prepare you for something else more significant that is going to happen down the road. That is a basic pattern of how life works. If you burn yourself on the stove…Cut yourself with a knife,,, These are little lessons readying you for The Big One.

That is why we have school. From kindergarten onward we are taught how to be ready for what might be coming up next. (I hope this isn’t getting too philosophical for you,) But you will find that television’s purpose is to either prepare you for something that will happen later or help you escape what is happening now. It’s just that simple.

That, too, is why we have sports. According to those who know these things there are more than 8,000 sports. Sport goes way beyond soccer, cricket, basketball, hockey, tennis, volleyball, ping pong, and baseball —to list the eight most popular. And please don’t write me to tell me what I left out. All sports are not equal. I know I left out 7,992 including snooker.

We play at sports. And television has made it possible to watch sports on an unimaginable scale. Millions of us watch. Watching it gives us stupefying pleasure. That is, until COVID-19 invaded our lives and made it impossible for teams to gather and spectators to watch them. COVID-19 has destroyed sports. The best part of life has been quashed.

Only seventeen people now want to tune in the any sports channel even though Covid19 is allowing us more free time. We got spoiled watching current, live sporting events. Sports viewership on ESPN is down 50% compared to last year. It’s a desert. There is nothing more than old sports programing and pessimistic news of speculation when seasons will be starting up again.

We might as well be watching a knitting fest. There’s hardly anything left of life. It is mysterious: people don’t even want to watch a game of B-I-N-G-O.

But how do you just wipe a whole baseball season off the blackboard? Baseball, not twiddling your thumbs, is our national pastime. But baseball has its hangups. It has gotten fat and lazy.

Money is a challenging obstacle. Baseball players, through their excellent union, have become filthy rich, and they are not going to run out there and play for free. Or walk out there and play for less, no sireee. But they might just walk out on strike. Things get cluttered up because the commissioner’s office and the players’ association would “discuss in good faith the economic feasibility of playing games in the absence of spectators or at appropriate substitute neutral sites.” The owners take this to mean a “50/50 revenue share” for them. The players define it as a “salary cap” for them. They cannot agree. Each side is convinced the other is trying to gouge them. Then there is us, the fans. We get screwed.

What is true is that players’ annual average salary is $4.4 million, and the owners’ teams have increased to absurd values into the billions of dollars. Television money makes this possible. These days many, many occupations have salaries beyond all reason. That someone should earn millions of dollars for being able to field a ground ball most of the time (but not all) a ball is hit to him is crazy. 20 million well-meaning, good-hearted people can’t find jobs regardless of how needy or hopeless our infra-structure. Once again we are left standing at the corner of Money and Grubbing. You are looking at capitalism gone crazy.

Take the wonderful, easy way out: open a good book.