Well, that didn’t take long. After a weekend spent joyfully celebrating the return of baseball, Monday hit with a ton of reality bricks.
The Miami Marlins have reportedly at least 12 players testing positive for Covid-19, plus some coaches. MLB stepped in and postponed the Marlins’ scheduled game in Miami against the Baltimore Orioles. And, since the Marlins’ positive tests occurred in Philadelphia (where they’d been playing the Phillies), MLB also postponed the New York Yankees’ game in Philadelphia.
The next 24-48 hours will give an indication of whether this is a hiccup or a collapsing season. If testing shows the impact has been contained, the Marlins can dip into their pool of 60 available players and resume playing once permitted. That’s why each team has a larger-than-usual 30-man active roster and 30 more available on short notice.
But it’s easy to see the whole house of cards falling down. Postponing more than a couple of games can create scheduling nightmares in a season with few off days already. Much worse, we could see an expanding outbreak that renders teams unable to play or facilities deemed unsafe. And that’s to say nothing of what might happen if someone were to become seriously ill.
This quote in The Athletic today speaks volumes about the situation:
“Major League Baseball needs to be thinking about the Phillies,” Dr. Zachary Binney, an epidemiologist at Emory University’s Oxford College, said Monday on The Athletic’s Starkville podcast. “They have conducted perhaps an inadvertent experiment, but an experiment nonetheless, on whether the virus can be transferred in a game from one team to their opponent. And we are awaiting the results of that experiment. We’ll see that in Philly, I think, over the next three to five days or so. But I think if you want to be cautious, you should probably be quarantining the Phillies as well for the next five days. And that’s extra rough for them because really, they didn’t do anything wrong. But again, it’s the virus that sets the agenda here, and you have to build your agenda around what it’s doing.”
Any sense that continuing to play cannot be achieved safely could start a ripple effect of players and other personnel opting out, and in a very short time the experiment could be over. How many players scheduled to take the field today might already be having second thoughts? “An inadvertent experiment” can’t be the words players want to read today.
Like many others, I got caught up in enjoying the games again the past few days. I started to believe this might just work, being an outdoor game with lots of space between players and precautions being taken.
If this can’t work in today’s America, though, I can’t imagine how the NFL can pull it off this fall. And colleges? I doubt they ever take the field. Too many people in much too close quarters, way more so than baseball requires.
The NBA’s Orlando bubble experiment gets under way within the week, and though they seem to be taking strong measures to protect the players’ health, that could unravel just as quickly if anything goes wrong.
Maybe sports is a luxury the U.S. just couldn’t manage because of how poorly we’ve handled containing the virus in comparison to the rest of the world. These restarts didn’t take place during a time when the cases were under control, but rather the opposite, during a spike. Maybe things can still work out, but we won’t have to look far for reasons why if they don’t.
