Clearly those games have meaning for the players and their team's fans watching or listening at home, but they are less than exciting.
You cannot gimmick the tension that surrounds post-season baseball. You need fans in the stands. You need the young woman covering her face because she can't watch the 3-2 pitch with two on and nobody out. You need the tension in the faces of the young men sitting with her. You need the cut to the old lady decked out in her team's colors, her eyes wide with wonder as the noise of the crowd reaches a crescendo on each pitch. You need the crowd screaming that the ump just blew it with that last pitch that was too close to take, perhaps, but still not a strike as he called it. You need all of that and more. And you cannot manufacture it.
From a standpoint of everyone on that field being relentless competitors and doing their best to win, whatever it takes to win, that IS happening. There seems to be no lack of effort on anyone's part.
However, the intense emotion and tension which has accumulated throughout the journey of a lengthy season and that now rests on a pitch which might culminate in either righteous joy or abject futility, that sense that everything has led to this moment on the field and now rests on what the pitcher delivers and how the hitter responds, the same sense captured in so many seasons before this one, and the feelings that have fueled so many autumn contests in the past is what is so sorely missed in 2020.
No cardboard cutout and or soundtrack of crowd noise can capture it.
No screaming broadcaster can project that emotion for us.
This postseason is muted by the 2020 pandemic and it will only be memorable for what it has lacked: the fans and what they bring to the games.
They are who really make the games great, especially in the post-season.
The coronavirus has infected us in so many more ways than we might have anticipated.
Poll
1 (33.3%)