This year, baseball allowed the roster to expand to 26 players. I mean, ballplayers will have to live by the same rules the rest of us have to, right? Coronavirus is indifferent to dollar signs, right? That being the case, let's look at some of baseball's "norms" and how they soon will devolve into "abnorms":ġ.) Dugouts: Hmmmmm.
Just apply today's social distancing rules to a Major League Baseball game when(ever) it returns to the corner of East 9th and Carnegie. What we didn't cover (ostensibly due to lack of column space, but more accurately due to my lack of writing talent), was how all of this coronavirus stuff was going to impact the game itself. We focused on how different things will be for Joe Fan when things return to quasi-normal. The last time we met, I think we talked about how the "sellout" crowd of 2020 or '21 will look far different than the sellouts of way back in, oh, say, 2019. Possibly one of the very first "naming rights" deals ever negotiated.Īnd what's with the asking of my name and birthday seemingly every 30 seconds? Heck, I was born in that hospital shouldn't they already have that information? Or is the real objective actually to just keep asking away until I make a mistake and then using that as justification for throwing my rear out? A tricky bunch, I tell you. I guess the city of Fairview should be happy the hospital still bears their name. Seriously, how come it's called Fairview Hospital if it's located in Cleveland? Fairview's just on the other side of the valley, no? I'm way too lazy to verify this but I'll bet that long, long ago Cleveland annexed the hospital side. As you will see, things some of which have been festering for a long, long time. As a result, I found him much more entertaining as a radio jock than a musician.īefore we begin this issue's foray into literary excellence, in spite of having spent the last several days in Fairview Hospital for a malady, the cause of which is yet TBD, there are a few things I need to get off my chest. And, make no mistake about it, Stanley’s gig as the afternoon talk show host on classic rock station WNCX didn’t hurt his visibility throughout the city, and undoubtedly contributed to the growth of the Michael Stanley “legend” over the years.
In Cleveland, Stanley’s reputation was more legend than substance, probably because he arrived on the rock scene at the tail end of the rock explosion of the ‘60s and ‘70s, in which a stretch of incredible rock talent made it difficult for the “merely good” talent to make much of an impact. It’s particularly ironic for me, personally, because – as was the case with Levine – I wasn’t much of a fan of Michael Stanley either (at least the on-stage version).
I never considered the notion that one column after writing about the death of a local radio personality, Les Levine, I’d be writing a similar column about Michael Stanley.īut here we go again, ironically, navigating a similar path for a local rock hero/disc jockey.