It’s a ‘day game at Wrigley’ kind of Friday

Does it matter? Does it ever?

Long before I ever even thought about sitting at a keyboard to write about baseball, years before the Cincinnati Reds began their rapid decline into irrelevance, eons before social media, there was day baseball in Wrigley Field on the north side of Chicago.

During the summers you could come inside after smashing wiffleball homers over the backyard fence, flip on the tv, turn the dial until you found WGN, and watch the Cubs play baseball. Every now and then, you’d get to see them playing the Reds, even.

Back then, the Cubs were bad. Real bad, the kind of bad-bad that the Reds have found themselves being for much of the last three decades. Still, there was just something about the idea of a packed house of folks roasting in the midday sun, all waiting for Andre or Ryne or Shawon to sock a big one onto Waveland Avenue so they could throw beer all over themselves.

I’m 100% not here to fan shame. To me, it’s simply a small celebration of an era of Cubs fandom that resonates with me more and more as the Reds drift further and further from any semblance of success. Cubs fans then, despite the absolute worst efforts of their team for decade upon decade, showed up for the spectacle that was afternoon ball at Wrigley whether their team was four games out of first place or forty.

For as much as it pains me to watch the Reds scratching and clawing their way out of last place and into fourth place in the division year after year, it also pains me to watch their games from afar with so few folks in the stands around them. Baseball is just so damn much better when it is played in front of a packed house, and since the Reds are the team I watch, I constantly watch baseball being played in an empty stadium.

Red seats everywhere. Cavernous noises.

The team’s ownership has done nothing to deserve fans, and I’m firmly on the side of wanting something, anything tangible from them before ever committing another dollar to support their cause. From a purely objective perspective, however, I do miss watching the game be played in front of 35,000 folks instead of five to seven.

The Reds are in Wrigley today, tomorrow, Sunday. They’re putting a bow on yet another moribund season, as are the Cubs themselves. Still, despite gale warnings and a chance of rain tomorrow, I expect we’ll see a pretty packed house to watch two teams play the game with absolutely nothing on the line.

I really do loathe that the current Reds ownership group has sucked the joy out of the franchise to the point where we don’t see that happen in Cincinnati anymore. I am glad, though, that at least there’s one place you can count on where folks still stumble in for the joy of the game despite having been beaten down and left for dead more often than not.

Baseball, the beautiful game, deserves that at least somewhere. This weekend, the Reds get to feel that finally, too.

First pitch is set for 2:20 PM ET. Lineups below.