Pandemic Park

Upon learning that COVID-19 prevented live attendance at Major League Baseball games.

This spring, the news broke that baseball season would be but a dugout shadow and cardboard cutout of its former self. No inappropriate cheers, but a soundtrack of static. No crying or hot-dog wrappers or peanut shells. Cardboard crowds, fan noise piped in that sounded like the fizzle and squawk between AM radio stations. The fake simulating…overcoming…reality. Semioticians like Umberto Eco must be having a field day.

Tired of reading, eating, sleeping, watching Sopranos reruns, and doomscrolling, I decided to clean the garage. I stubbed my toe on what remained of an oak sideboard we had abandoned. The two side cabinets could no longer pivot smoothly on their hinges, and when we tried to close them, the legs would wobble. I saved the bottom drawer. I liked its tidy, deco-like sections, its sense of order. I turned it vertically…and voilá! I’d build my own stadium without leaving the house.

I’d call it Pandemic Park. I could spell it out with bulletin-board letters from a giveaway cigar box I picked up at a garage sale. I rummaged through my drawers for a hand-crank, 1" x 1" player piano playing “Take me out to the Ballgame,” but could also double as a convenient hook for my face-mask. I glued a small baseball to the side of the frame, stuck inside, just like us.

Pandemic Park from the Bottom Up

Just above the letters, a catcher stands behind a batter, but no one is throwing a pitch or swinging weighted bats in the on-deck circle. Above, an ominous “Stay Home!” order. Too heavy a metaphor? To the right, a spring-loaded pin-ball baseball game with players on the field, frozen in their positions—as if from an earlier era—i.e. the previous season.

Pandemic: 1918, 2020

Just above the Dodgers banner (I’ll explain soon), you might make out two plastic dead people. I inserted the card of an early St. Louis Nationals player from a baseball pop-up book and, with a Sharpie, added a mask and “1918” (for our last plague). That year, the Pandemic Archive pleaded: “The Health Commissioner for the city of St. Louis urges citizens to avoid fatigue, alcohol, and crowds, and to get plenty of fresh air and to avoid those who are ill.” Do we ever learn? The panel on the right includes a headless player, the words “Yer out,” and a danger sign.

Top three panels

Keep Going

These three panels include a pitcher throwing to a catcher, but there is no batter (bottom left) Behind them is a bank of stadium lights (buttons) . In the panel above them, the VHS box (only) of the movie, “Damn Yankees.” As far as I am concerned (with or without a pandemic), it’ll always be Damn Yankees. Other countries follow public health instructions. Americans…not so much. Gwen Verdon graces the cover, maskless, oblivious.

The large panel houses a $5 glove I snapped up at the local thrift store. I added a face mask and wedged in a paper bat souvenir (and the banner) from an “Old Timer’s Day” game at Dodger Stadium, where my family watched me scream myself hoarse because Sandy Koufax (my childhood hero…kinda still is) was there. I was turning 60. Back then, you could high-five complete strangers…even scream. Writing this, Dodger Stadium is being prepared to be L.A.’s largest coronavirus testing and vaccine site.

Behind the glove is a copy of Koufax’s scouting card (from the same pop-up book). As it turns out, Koufax signed his first contract on May 15, 1954 — two days after I was born. The number “32” is pasted on the outside top of the frame (Koufax’s number). But I digress here. This pandemic has seriously addled my mind.

The sawed-off end of a bat peeks out of the side of the frame, unusable like the ball at the bottom, holds a baseball tie one of my kids gave me. Why dress up? Where do I have to go?

Atop the frame and away from the action, a tiny ceramic Buddha cradles a yellow baseball bat. Buddhism’s four noble truths are at work here: the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering. Heavy, I know. A lonely player, away from the action, crouches, ready…just in case. Nothingingness, I suspect. And suffering.

Buddha baseball player. Fielder crouched, ready.

For that “museum” look, I retrofitted a “sneeze guard” instead of using glass.

That’s Pandemic Park. At 66, I have resorted to fashioning an 8th-grade diorama from an old drawer with enough hackneyed baseball metaphors to fill a stadium.

My testament to baseball does not include Donald Trump because I would have to look at him every time I sat at my desk. So, there are no orange peels for hair, no Trump heads for batting practice, no solitary figure perched on his single “base,” no McDonald's wrappers, no plastic TV playing his tribunal in front of the criminal court at the Hague for crimes against humanity—lives heartlessly stranded, struck out, swept aside, sidelined, stolen…and toes tagged. Sure, I long for America’s past-time (misspelled for its painful dad-joke irony), but “Make American Great Again?” No. “Yer out!” “Stay home!”

I hope this is a relic by spring training next year (2021). I miss real noise, litter, and the game designed, as Bart Giamatti put it, “to break your heart.”