On a perfect evening for baseball, an empty stadium and an empty feeling
If there was ever a day that called out for a baseball game, begged for it, this was the day. By the time people would have been milling outside Durham Bulls Athletic Park on Thursday, the sun was starting to make its way down through an unending blue sky toward the horizon. There was just a twinge of lingering afternoon heat, brushed away quickly by a persistent breeze.
They’ve written songs about days like this: It’s a beautiful day for a ballgame/for a ballgame, today.
On Thursday, April 9, 2020, what was supposed to be Opening Day in Durham, the Bulls were nowhere to be found. Nor were the Charlotte Knights. Or Wool E. Bull. Or anyone. The gates to the DBAP were locked, the concourses dark, the flagpoles unadorned. The infield dirt was immaculate, but lacked bases. The batting cage stood sentinel behind the plate.
“Wash your horns,” the electronic billboards outside the DBAP admonished. The occasional car drove down Blackwell Street, which would have been a pedestrian mall teeming with fans. High above left field, under the snorting bull, tables were stacked on the empty patio at Tobacco Road. A photographer, Brian Moyer, wandered the public spaces in the left-field corner with his camera, taking advantage of the empty spaces and golden light.
“No one’s here, so...” Moyer said, with a shrug of his shoulders.
No one was there.
The coronavirus has taken so much from us, so much more of consequence, but baseball, too, and on what should have been as fine an evening for the sport as ever conjured up by nature, there was nothing but emptiness.
It’s not an unfamiliar feeling these days. These little voids in our lives echo, in their own small way, our national mood. It’s hard to put a finger on that feeling sometimes, but it has been perhaps best expressed as a collective grief.
We’re not only grieving for those who have suffered and been lost, and those who inexorably will suffer and be lost, but for our entire way of life, for every part of our daily routine we took for granted and has now been disrupted.
Sports is a big part of that, a yawning missing expanse not easily filled by NASCAR drivers racing on their computers or replays of past events, as much nostalgia as the latter may evoke. Thursday was supposed to be the first round of the Masters. Nothing can replace that. Or baseball, baseball especially. Even if it no longer holds the same exalted position it once did, the American pastime, its arrival is still as much a rhythm of spring as wafts of pine pollen.
The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.
The occasional labor dispute has put the game on hold, even wiped out a World Series, but that was always just baseball. Life elsewhere went along as planned.
But now the absence of baseball marks the time. The Bulls — and, on the other side of the Triangle, the Carolina Mudcats — have been an integral part of our summers for decades, woven into our collective spirit not only by a movie but by routine. A minor-league baseball game is about entertainment more than winning and losing, and the Bulls have always understood that, layering distraction after distraction between innings.
You go to enough games, and it doesn’t take many, and you know exactly what’s coming next, when Wool E. Bull is going to enter from the right field corner in his go-kart, or when the little kid is going to race the mascot around the bases, and Wool E. Bull is going to lollygag his way down the first-base line and get beat. (The kid’s surprise and delight at having bested the mascot, however, is always novel.)
That was all supposed to happen Thursday night. Instead, at 6:35 p.m., when the first pitch of the season was supposed to be thrown, there were only the sounds of machinery humming on the roof of American Tobacco and cars shuffling past on the Durham Freeway. Mundane sounds, absent ceremony or significance, baseball conspicuous by its absence.
This story was originally published April 9, 2020 at 6:50 PM with the headline "On a perfect evening for baseball, an empty stadium and an empty feeling."
