Is It Baseball Yet?
The late night Boston sports shows, like CSNNE’s “Sports Tonight,” pretty much capture where I’m at right now on the Boston sports continuum of interest. I flipped over to “Sports Tonight” the other night after the Bruins game to find out what’s happening with the Patriots. Or to get some informed post-game reaction to the Bruins’ win I just watched. How about finding something — anything — to get me fired up for the new baseball season? I don’t follow hoops, which is good, since there wasn’t much time allotted to basketball, save for a Celtics highlights package.
When I was a kid, and later when I wrote The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading And Bubblegum Book, and later still when I operated a sports collectibles business in Boston, I got interested in baseball when I started seeing new wax packs of baseball cards appear on corner store counters. Now, of course, there are no more corner stores, and if you want packs of cards, you go to Walmart or Target, and you take a lot of money with you.
So I’m in a transition vortex right now. Don’t get me wrong — I love baseball. I remember when it was the number one sport in the country, just as big as boxing (yeah, I’m that old). And I’m sure that my passion for baseball will return when the real bullets start to fly next week. But for now, while baseball is still shooting blanks, I’m going to tune into the Bruins game tomorrow night and hope they get their scoring mojo back and get closer to a wildcard spot in the Playoffs.