Entire directory gone

I don't use any type of cloud storage either.

Agreed 100%.
At the college I work at the IT people used to call the old Windows Explorer bowser, Windows Exploder! I don't know if they have a nickname for Edge.

Problem solved. How, is a crazy story.
It turns out my backup hadn't been working since mi-July. I had it set to do a full backup every fie days with incremental backups all the other days. It was then supposed to erase the older ones so there would be room on the drive.
Somehow it was changed to not erase older versions. I don't know how. I certainly didn't change it.
Anyway, when I realized what had happened I was hoping whatever caused the disappearing directory problem was after it stopped backing up. Apparently it was.
So, the baseball directory is back where it should be and I have a backup going now.

That still leaves the question about the Recycle Bin. These days does it look exactly like File Explorer? If so, I can't figure out how to empty it.

Good news! Glad to hear that you got your data back,

Yes - when you open the recycle bin, the contents are displayed in File Explorer.

You can empty the recycle bin by right-clicking on the Recycle Bin icon and choosing "Empty Recycle Bin".

One more thing: I don't know what your backup strategy is, but it's a good idea to perform a backup that saves files for a period of time, even if you delete the originals from your system.

As an example, you might perform a full backup once a month and then perform weekly incremental backups that only capture the changes. In addition, you would retain all backups for a period of time, as an example, maybe like 6 months or even longer depending upon how much storage space you have available for backups.

The idea here is that if you accidentally delete something, a file(s) becomes corrupted, etc. you may not realize that the problem occurred until a considerable time later. A backup strategy that keeps all data for a while will allow you to go back to a backup taken before the problem happened. If you only have one backup taken after the problem first happened, you would be out of luck.

Good backup programs such as Macrium Reflect have the ability to perform incremental and / or differential backups easily.