It isn't true, not in the slightest, that fans won't be able to watch the Pirates at PNC Park this summer.
As a good many folks who've made a casual stroll across the Clemente Bridge can attest, there's a segment of the western walkway, barely a slab of cement, where one can see through the sliver of space between the big batter's eye and the small metal-topped security building to see ... baseball.
Most prominently, it's where fans perched en masse in 2013, on the night of the Blackout, unable to get inside but eager for a peek. And several hours after Johnny Cueto dropped the ball, it's also where one of those same fans famously took a celebratory plunge into the Allegheny River below.
Hey, who wouldn't follow that guy now, right?
As the safer corners of our society gradually reopen from the coronavirus shutdown -- maybe even Pittsburgh someday, barring the further movement of goalposts in Harrisburg -- sports will return, too. They really will. There are all kinds of plans being leaked, willfully or otherwise, by the NHL, Major League Baseball and NBA, and almost all of them point toward an initial stirring near the end of this month, a revving up through June, and a full restart in July. That's no coincidence. They're working off the same information, the same directives.
Within that, just as gradually but also not coincidentally, those plans have morphed from single-city biospheres to allowing teams to play in their home venues. Which means, for us, the Penguins will compete for the Stanley Cup at PPG Paints Arena and the Pirates will open their 2020 season right where they belong, as well.
Man, that makes me smile.
Unsettling as all this has been, I'd dreaded as much as anything that the Penguins and Pirates would've been marooned for weeks or months way out in Phoenix or North Dakota or Saskatoon or wherever. Not for myself and not for our business, since we'll always go wherever we need to go. But rather, for our city itself.
Conversely, imagine later this summer passing Centre Avenue while seeing the marquee showing 'PENGUINS VS. FLYERS TONIGHT,' and knowing there's hockey happening in there. Or driving on the 10th Street Bypass, right by the water's edge on the Downtown side, glancing over at PNC Park with the toothbrush lights aglow, the scoreboard flickering, and knowing there's baseball happening in there.
See what I mean?
I'm neither an epidemiologist nor a sociologist to discern when exactly we'll cross over from the virus being a bigger danger to us than the economic/emotional damage of seemingly endless seclusion. But I'm betting, from no perspective beyond my own, that it won't be a hell of a lot longer.
On one hand, in addition to the coronavirus scene improving, from the curve finally flattening in New York, to more innovative and sweeping research, to more effective distribution of medical equipment, to the first credible emergence of a treatment, to the first credible sign of a vaccine, to the first credible expansion of testing ... it's far from over, but it's better now than at any stage yet. Even those who are paranoid about speaking an upbeat syllable on this subject would concede that much.
On the other hand, people are suffering terribly from those economic/emotional side effects. And it's worsening with each passing week. More companies, large and small, are closing. Yesterday alone, the retail giant J. Crew set up bankruptcy. The same happened, on an infinitely smaller level, at the Colony Cafe in our own Downtown, a place that my entire family and Taylor Haase loved visiting. Mostly to pet the cats but also for a pretty good cup of coffee:
.@ColonyCatCafe = the greatest pic.twitter.com/f1pIHrvAj7
— Taylor Haase (@TaylorHaasePGH) May 16, 2018
Being that Allegheny County more than met/exceeded the governor's existing requirements, this is ridiculous.
As I'd predicted all along, we were going to be anchored to Philadelphia for absolutely no reason. Here we go. https://t.co/LJsgzPBldw
— Dejan Kovacevic (@Dejan_Kovacevic) May 1, 2020
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
Oneil Cruz, Feb. 24 in Tampa, Fla. - GETTYI’ve never before noticed the similarities between Pittsburgh and Kaunas, Lithuania, such as how the confluence of the Neris and Nemunas rivers is nearly identical to the Allegheny and Mon. pic.twitter.com/KozK1eSAmX
— John J. Chapman (@johnjchapman) May 1, 2020