“Throughout our history, baseball has helped us get through difficult times. Baseball will continue to be here for you as we face these challenges together as a community and we look forward to when we can safely get back on the field and hear the words, ‘Play Ball.’”
That’s from an open letter Rob Manfred wrote to fans on March 26, which would have been Opening Day if not for that meddling coronavirus. The letter was mostly anodyne, avoiding saying anything other than baseball is good and no-baseball is bad but it’s what we have to do, but there was one other section that laid the groundwork for how Manfred would eventually sell the sport coming back before the virus went away:
“Today is unlike any Opening Day in Major League Baseball’s long history. We need to call on the optimism that is synonymous with Opening Day and the unflinching determination required to navigate an entire baseball season to help us through the challenging situation currently facing us all.”
You can read that as a pep talk with a baseball sheen, but I think that subsequent events have proven how off base that would be. Because what Manfred was doing was associating a difficult healing process with the long baseball season. If you combine that with the quote at the top, it’s clear that he tipped his hand. None of this was a coincidence. Rob Manfred wanted people thinking baseball coming back would help the nation heal, and if they only read that letter, he wanted them thinking it was their own idea.
The other thing that tipped his hand was how, in an interview he gave to ESPN that day, he showed his hand to everyone and yelled, “HEY THIS IS MY HAND EVERYONE! DO YOU WANT TO SEE MY HAND?”
From a Yahoo Sports article published that day:
"Our players will be back and we will be part of the recovery, the healing in this country, from this particular pandemic," Manfred told ESPN.
He said he sees MLB's comeback as "a real milestone in the return to normalcy" much as the sport helped the United States heal after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that also temporarily halted sport.
"I think you saw it after 9-11 in terms of the resumption of play," Manfred told ESPN. "I was there in (New York's) Shea Stadium that night that we began playing -- it was one of the most memorable games I've ever attended.
"It's an honor for our sport to be regarded in a way that we have been, part of our country coming back from some horrific events. We hope that we can play a similar role with respect to this one."
So this wasn’t subtle. This was an official position on bringing baseball back, and it was (eventually) parroted by outlets like CNBC (Op-ed: Here’s how sports can return and help America heal) and the New York Times (The Healing Power of Baseball).
One school of thought was that sports returning would mean that we were all getting back to normal, which would make us feel better. From the CNBC article:
For one, bringing sports back would be a big signal that the country is returning to some sort of normalcy. Just being able to watch a “live” basketball or baseball game or golf match on TV would do a lot to soothe our collective nerves.
Another way of looking at it was that the distraction of caring about something else for a few hours would help us all through tough times. From the NYT article:
Spectator sports have therapeutic benefit in times of both national and personal crisis. For a few precious hours we are distracted, engaged in virtual competition, as the athletes we either watch in person or view onscreen become our avatars. We celebrate their victories and mourn their losses as if they were our own.
Here’s the problem with both of those arguments: The country isn’t normal. Things aren’t going well. We can’t eat in restaurants or go to concerts, and we have to wear masks anytime we go inside buildings, and we’re staying six feet away from people on the street, and those regulations suck and are the right thing to do, and there’s nothing that baseball can do about it.
Baseball is a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage. Things are no better in this country because baseball is playing; it’s fine to watch a game for three hours and be entertained, but then it’s over and you’re right back where you started, and that’s it. That distraction did not transmogrify into therapy. Brandon Belt’s hot August has not soothed anyone’s nerves once they turned the TV off. These are just nice things that are happening, separate from and unrelated to the apocalyptic things happening outside.
Both the NYT article and Manfred’s comments in March claim that baseball helped America heal after 9/11. But did we ever really heal? Did we get stitches in the wound, or did we just let it bleed and clot, calcifying into something infected and ugly? When baseball came back, did it do anything in particular, or did it let us pretend that endless wars were as American as apple pie, that as long as Derek Jeter was jump-throwing guys out from deep short, we didn’t need to ask ourselves any hard questions about our way of life?
In other words, are normalcy and comfort really things we need, or are they just things we want? Part of the reason the pandemic is so much worse in this country than anywhere else on Earth — counting on you to make us look better, India! — is that so many people are pretending it isn’t happening. People go to their motorcycle rally in Sturgis, which could be responsible for 250,000 new cases.
These people acted like the country was returning to normalcy. They did a massive amount of damage to our public health infrastructure, and they’ll end up costing some people their lives and other people permanent lung damage, and for what? For the sake of acting like there isn’t a virus, that we deserve to live our lives without worrying about it.
That’s not healing. That’s not helping us beat this thing. Baseball is obviously not solely responsible for this kind of mythmaking — many people strongly believe they can beat the coronavirus with individual action and personal virtue — but it’s not helping either.
We don’t need baseball to be played. As a country, we never needed baseball to come back. We don’t need a sense of normalcy. We need to treat a virus that’s closing in on 200,000 American deaths with a sense of seriousness and purpose. Baseball’s not helping with that. It can’t, really. It’s too busy trying to convince us that everything is fine.