Masked Fan
With that sort of record, it’s hard to blame a Brooklyn kid for turning toward the Bronx.
“Half of the people in Brooklyn, half of the kids in the street like me, were Yankees fans, and half were Dodger fans…We used to spend all of our time arguing who’s better: Duke Snider or Mickey Mantle? Yogi Berra or Roy Campanella? Pee Wee Reese or Phil Rizzuto?” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), recalled in an interview with the New York Times.
Today, Fauci has a piece of history to call his own in Cooperstown.
“I hope there’s some form of baseball this summer, even if it’s just for TV. I feel that strongly, one, because I’m an avid baseball fan but also because it’s [good] for the country’s mental health to have the great American pastime be seen.”
“I’m living in Washington,” Dr. Fauci said later on in June. “We have the world champion Washington Nationals. I want to see them play again.”
The 2020 MLB season, at 60 regular-season games, will be the most truncated in the league’s history. In a year when the major storyline is not about what players are doing on the field, but simply that they’ve taken the field at all, Dr. Fauci’s mask is an important way to tell the story of this period of the National Pastime.
Isabelle Minasian was the digital content specialist at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
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