Call a cab

And let's see, where were we?  In March, all the baseball spring training camps broke up faster than an anti-vax meeting when someone shows up with books, and only this week are we getting back to baseball.

Instead of 162 games, there will be 60, with limited travel. The designated hitter will lumber off the bench for all teams in all games. Extra inning games will have a new wrinkle - each half inning will begin with a runner on second base and no outs, making it much easier to score. This wrinkle will remind former backyard players of the whole "imaginary man on base" rule that we had when we played with 3 or 4 guys on a team.

And when the dust settles, there will be 26 players on each team plus a taxi squad of three extras ready to step in on road trips for players who are injured or COVID-infected. One of the three must be a catcher, and the others will be position players or pitchers.

"Taxi squad" has come to be a term we use for any group of auxiliary personnel ready to step in at a moment's notice. The concept has been used in the National Football League for years, where teams always have extra guys around for when a regular player finds that his kneebone is no longer connected to his shinbone (or anything else).

It's new to baseball, but the definition doesn't mean that these extra players are sitting around, a cab ride away from getting a good break when someone else gets a bad one. In the late 1940s, a man named Paul Brown ran the Cleveland Browns football team. He was such an adept scout of talent that he always had more players around than he was allowed to have on the team, but team owner Arthur B. "Mickey" McBride okayed his plan to claim that the extra guys were actually driving his Yellow Cabs around Cleveland.

There is a word "sinecure" to describe a job that you don't have to do to get paid; it often comes up in discussions of the sons-in-law of politicians who appoint the useless new relative to the position of Assistant Vice-Chairperson of the Employees Benefit Council at a sweet salary and no need to even show up the council office, if he even knows where it is. As far as anyone at the league was concerned, these guys were cabdrivers.

Don't ask too many questions; it's bad for your health, got it?