It’s kind of like “game day at Wrigley” on Friday

Long before I ever thought about sitting at a keyboard and writing about baseball, years before the Cincinnati Reds began their rapid descent into insignificance, eons before social media, there was daytime baseball at Wrigley Field north of Chicago.

In the summer, after hitting Wiffleball home runs over the backyard fence, you could walk in, turn on the TV, turn the dial until you found WGN, and watch the Cubs play baseball. Every now and then you could even see them playing against the Reds.

The Cubs were bad back then. Real Bad, the kind of bad-bad the Reds have found themselves in for much of the last three decades. Still, there was something about the idea of ​​a packed house full of people roasting in the midday sun, all waiting for Andre, Ryne or Shawon to send a big ball down Waveland Avenue so they could pour beer all over themselves.

I am 100% not here to shame fans. To me, it's simply a little homage to an era of Cubs fanbase that continues to resonate with me more and more as the Reds move further and further away from any semblance of success. Cubs fans then showed up for the spectacle that was, despite their team's absolute worst performance in decades Afternoon ball at Wrigley It didn't matter if their team was four or four games out of first place.

As much as it pains me to watch the Reds struggle from last place to fourth place in the division year after year, it also pains me to watch their games from afar with so few people in the stands around them are around. Baseball is just so much better when it's played in front of a packed crowd, and since the Reds are the team I watch, I'm constantly watching baseball being played in an empty stadium.

Red seats everywhere. Cave-like noises.

The team's ownership has done nothing to deserve the fans, and I firmly believe that I want something, something tangible, from them before I ever spend another dollar to support their cause. However, from a purely objective perspective, I miss seeing the game played in front of 35,000 spectators instead of five or seven.

The Reds are at Wrigley today, tomorrow and Sunday. They're bowing down to another moribund season, as are the Cubs themselves. Still, despite storm warnings and the possibility of rain, I expect we'll see a pretty full house tomorrow as two teams play the game with absolutely nothing on the line stands.

I truly despise that the current Reds ownership group has taken so much joy away from the franchise that this will no longer happen in Cincinnati. However, I'm glad that there's at least one place you can rely on, where people still stumble to for the joy of the game, even though they've been beaten down and left to die many times.

Baseball, the beautiful game, at least deserves that somewhere. This weekend the Reds will finally feel it.

First pitch is scheduled for 2:20 p.m. ET. Lineups below.