As winter primes itself for another howling mess on the east cost of America, warning us of the horrors to come with a light flaking and sleeting in the early hours of this week, baseball has been played: Real, uniformed baseball, with actual MLB players, taking on an elite squad of Japanese all-stars at four or five in the morning. If you haven’t been rising with or before the sun to watch these games, good on you for maintaining a sleep schedule that will allow to fend off the inevitable winter madness that comes for us all.
But for the rest of us, it’s been warmly comforting to see baseball played in Phillies uniforms by Rhys Hoskins and Carlos Santana as part of the 2018 MLB Japan All-Star Series.