Baseball's Dying, But Not In The Way Shank Thinks

Shank takes note of the rather large numbers of former baseball players passing on:

Hearing that another baseball Hall of Famer died strikes me as a macabre metaphor for the sport I love.

Judging by the manner in which he writes about sports, I'll have to call bullshit here.

This has been a year of isolation, lockdown, fear, and death. The daily obits (“the Irish Sports Pages”) have been required, lengthy reading for old-timers like me. And October 2020 feels like the month of death.

In the darkness, we have a Cooperstown carnage. Joe Morgan died Sunday. Last week, it was Whitey Ford. The week before that, it was Bob Gibson. In September, Lou Brock. In August, Tom Seaver. In April, Al Kaline.

Shank goes on from there to chronicle what definitely looks like the many deaths of former MLB players, and it's sad to note. That said, the 'isolation, lockdown' that Shank bemoans is a completely, 100% self-inflicted wound by the honchos running MLB (and other sports, for that matter) by shortened seasons and especially the lack of crowds at the stadiums, making the game difficult, if not impossible, to watch.