Photo: China News Service (Getty Images)
During normal summers, we’d be in the midst of baseball season. Fans from Seattle to St. Petersburg would happily wander into stadiums every day and night to cheer on the home team while scarfing down hot dogs and sipping on frosty beers. Well, this isn’t a normal summer and due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the MLB season just began last week (the minor league seasons were canceled) and there are no fans in attendance. Instead, teams opted for filling the stands with various cardboard cutouts.
This is likely due to the fact that seeing completely empty stadiums is jarring for fans watching at home, so teams throughout the league are implementing plans to pack the stands with cardboard cutouts. They likely saw that the Korean league managed to show a festive atmosphere with cutouts (except for the odd choice of sex dolls).
Depending on which team you watch on television, you’ll see different types of cutouts. Many teams are offering fans the ability to buy cutouts of themselves to be seated in the stands. Others are adding cutouts of retired MLB players, celebrities, and even dogs.
The latter is the case at Citi Field, home of the New York Mets. Not only did the team intersperse dogs in the crowd with fans and celebrities, many of the dogs actually belong to players. With that in mind, one of the weirdest, funniest things to happen in the first few days of play involved one of the canine cutouts.
The Braves were in town to take on the Mets when Atlanta’s right fielder Adam Duvall hit a home run. It would be bad enough to give up a homer, but the ball actually smashed into one of the dog cardboard cutouts. It wasn’t just any dog. It also happened to be Mets third basemen Jeff McNeil’s dog Willow. If that doesn’t sum up the start of a very strange baseball season, we don’t know what does.
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