At the beginning of the week, I was putting together an article which stressed the added importance of having a healthy Yoenis Cespedes ready for Opening Day after the news of Michael Conforto‘s oblique injury. After the last few days, however, it wouldn’t make much sense now. Like every other sports fan at the moment, I’m just trying to process the magnitude of what’s taken place while bracing for what’s still ahead.
We’re now in our fourth day of the sports-wide shut down, and instead of being glued to our TVs watching Selection Sunday and Spring Training, it feels like we’ve been sucked into some awful version of Biff’s alternate 1985 in “Back to the Future.” The reality of going from what has always been one of the most enjoyable parts of the sports calendar to simply nothing at all still doesn’t seem real.
So, what do we do now? I guess we could keep watching ESPN and listening to sports radio to remind us thar there are no sports going on, but how long can we keep that up for? Trying to find a distraction to replace what has always been your No. 1 distraction is certainly proving to be difficult. How do you even remotely begin to fill what feels to be like an endless void without sports?
A Possible Solution
Since many of us are probably going to have some extra time on our hands, I bet that we can come up with some unique ways to get our “fix.” One Mets themed idea (you can do this for any sport/team obviously) involves the use of social media polling, and classic Mets games. No I’m not talking about just turning on whatever few games SNY decides to run and poll Twitter on which one was the best.
This is what what I have in mind: we at MetsMerized can create a weekly Twitter poll that would cover a variety of Mets related themes such as all-time players, memorable seasons, best endings, etc. We can then select the top 3-5 “best” games of that particular theme for everyone to vote on. Once the winning game is decided, we’d figure out a time and day each week for everyone to sit, watch, and comment on it together “live.” This is obviously far from from ideal, but it could be a fun way to our get our minds off things while still getting to talk Mets and enjoy some all-time classic games. Give us your feedback via social media and we can get this going soon!
I know it might feel like the sky is falling, but it’s important to remember that this time away is unfortunately what’s best for everyone and everything right now. Things will eventually settle, and sports (more importantly the world) will resume again at some point. It will be a tough road ahead until that happens, but in a weird way maybe we as fans needed it. Maybe we needed something as impactful as this to force everyone to take a step back and remember why we love sports so much in the first place.
We spend so much of our time as fans being critical (in the Mets case most of it is warranted) and stressing over what’s happening with our favorite teams and sports, that we forgot to appreciate what’s in front of us. When sports do come back, I think what we will remember most is just how happy we all were to simply be able to sit down and watch a game together, along with the reminder to never take what we love for granted (maybe even sports needs hear that we appreciate them every once and awhile).
Until that day comes, we’ll just have to get by with binging our favorite Mets games and wait (as patiently as we can) for sports triumphant return.
