Few fans check out baseball at the Big A as players return
In the old days (four months ago), the words “pitchers and catchers report” or “first day of spring training” would cause a flurry of activity for baseball fans.
Grab your autograph book and a pen. Get your phone ready for photos. Cross your fingers in hopes a player might toss you a baseball.
Not anymore. Not in 2020. Not in the midst of a pandemic.
On Friday, July 3, Angel players reported to “Summer Camp” at Angel Stadium, which was barricaded as if some big event was happening. Only a handful of fans showed up. The Angels are scheduled to begin an abbreviated 60-game season on July 24.
What if baseball happened with no one around to witness it, would it make it sound?
Those few who came strained their ears to see if they could hear the pop of a fastball into a mitt. Or maybe the crack of the bat.
Nope.
They squinted through the barricades into the home plate entrance to see the green grass. Only the rock pile was clearly visible. Some of them walked all the way around the stadium hoping to see popups flirting with the banners hanging in the left field pavilion. That didn’t work. There was no sign of baseball.
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio (or Mike Trout)? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Actually, we know where Mike Trout was. Inside the stadium. Along with Shohei Ohtani, Joe Maddon and the rest of the Angels.
“It’s so exciting,” said Miwa Nishikawa of Placentia. She was with her husband, Hideshi, walking around the stadium. “I want to be in there. I want to see them.”
They had made plans to go to Arizona for Spring Training in March, but the coronavirus changed all that.
Hideshi wore an Angels shirt. He walks around the stadium once a week. A few weeks ago, he said he was looking at his cellphone when he noticed a big guy riding past on a bicycle.
“It was Ohtani,” he said in Japanese to a reporter, using his wife as an interpreter.
On July 3, he thought he might get a glimpse of some of the Angels again.
“It is disappointing,” he said.
Father and son, Russ and Doug Mckee, ride bikes from Huntington Beach to the Big A a couple of times a week. It’s a 12-mile trip one way. They use the stadium as a rest stop, then turn around and ride home.
Friday, they were sitting under the giant red hats outside the main gate.
“I really want to see them on TV this year,” said Russ Mckee, 82.
They agreed on how weird it was that professional baseball was happening just a few hundred feet from where they were sitting, but they weren’t permitted to see it.
“The weird part about it is I’ll bet the players are freaked out,” said Doug, 60. “They’re playing in front of empty stands.”
Well, not exactly empty.
Security guard Ernie Macias, who was working inside the stadium along the left field line, said there is a section in the left-field corner where cardboard cutouts of fans have been placed.
“There are 20 or 30 of them out there,” Macias said.
He was working earlier this week when the Angels reported for preseason physicals. He said a group of fans waited by the players’ entrance.
“They were autograph seekers,” Macias said. “We had to run them off.”
It doesn’t look like autographs will happen anytime soon.