MLB may be suspended, but LSB isn’t

Good morning, folks...

Its been a crazy...well, any time period would seem to fit here. 24 hours? 48 hours? 72 hours? Week? Month?

We are in uncharted territory. Sports leagues around the world have suspended play due to the COVID-19 Coronavirus, Disneyland and DisneyWorld are closing, schools and universities have closed, and health officials are recommending that folks avoid gathering in large groups for the time being.

Life has changed, and it isn’t going back to normal anytime real soon. Hell, it may never go back to normal — but we know that it isn’t going back to anything resembling normal for at least a couple of months.

I’ve been doing Lone Star Ball for almost 15 years, and its settled into a routine...spring training starts, we have spring training stories, updates on position battles, various transactions...

Then there’s the season, and we have games, minor league updates, transactions, rumors, stats, all the things that go on during a season...

Then there’s the draft in June, and we obsess about that for a while. Then we do the mid-season rankings.

Then the season winds down, and we either have a bunch of excitement over a playoff push or the letdown of being out of the race.

Then there’s playoffs. We look back at the season that was. Then there’s the offseason. We do prospect rankings against. We look at who the Rangers might pursue in the offseason, there’s a bunch of trade talk and roster guesses and the like.

And then its spring training. And the cycle starts over again.

For the first time since I’ve been doing LSB, we have, essentially, a freeze. Everything is in suspension right now. We don’t know what teams are going to do, we don’t know what players are going to do, we don’t know who is going to be potentially affected by the Coronavirus, we don’t know when games will resume.

Its a weird time to be alive.

But just because there’s no baseball right now, it doesn’t mean that there will be no LSB. We will still be here, doing the morning links, doing posts, providing some sort of content. I’ve got some thoughts and ideas about what to do going forward — and there will probably be a bunch of Sporcle quizzes to help keep everyone busy — but LSB isn’t going anywhere. There will still be regular posts, and we’ll be finding ways to keep each other entertained here while we wait for baseball to crank back up.

In the meantime...

This is a very stressful time for everyone. Tensions are high. People are more likely to argue, especially given there’s no baseball to talk about.

I’m going to ask that the comments of front page posts be kept clear of politics, snarky comments about this or any other administration, and the like. I’m going to ask that everyone try to make an effort to avoid being ugly, nasty, or unnecessarily disagreeable in the comments.

And I’m going to ask people with moderation powers to err on the side of banning and deleting inflammatory comments, rather than letting things slide.

We, as a society, have a difficult road ahead of us, and things will get worse before they get better. But we will get through this, life will return to normal, baseball will be back, and we can get back to arguing about Rougned Odor’s contract and the Rangers are gonna get sum pitchin’ in here.