Well, here we are again.
It seems like it was maybe two months ago that MLB was forging ahead with its 60-game 2020 season, boldly forcing the Cardinals to make up 53 games delayed due COVID over their last 6 days and allowing Justin Turner to play several innings in the deciding game of the World Series after testing positive. Today, the 2021 season starts, and with it, hopefully fewer pandemic-related shenanigans and panics.
There will not, though, be zero pandemic-related shenanigans and panics. We’ve already discovered the coded Baseball Player Language that means “I won’t be getting the vaccine,” and it’s this:
Because I don’t want to make it seem like there’s a universal no among baseball players, so here’s Caleb Baragar celebrating his own vaccination:
“Personal choices.” “I’d like to leave it in the clubhouse.” These are codes for “lol nah not doing that shit and I will not be talking about why.” Maybe the reason why is legitimate, like an instinctive distrust of government health programs due to growing up hearing stories of the Tuskegee syphalis study. Maybe the reason is less legitimate, like “My aunt’s friend on Facebook says the vaccine is actually made by Lil Nas X and it’ll turn you into a gay Satan.” Regardless, the upshot is the same: not enough guys get the vaccine, a couple of them test positive, and everyone has to panic about it for a while.
I wasn’t exaggerating that much, by the way:
Kaycee Sogard, wife of former almost face of MLB Eric Sogard, is just laying it all out there. Players don’t want to get the vaccine, and they feel that appropriate measures for unvaccinated players are an assault on their freedoms. Not all of them, certainly, and probably not even most of them. But a lot. A good percentage.
The way to get back to normal in the clubhouse and on road trips is for them to get the fuck over it and get the vaccine when it’s available. The way to get back to normal in the stands is for America, en masse, to get the vaccine. If you want the pandemic to be over, then you have to help end it. If you want bars and restaurants open, and if you want to sit in a movie theater, and if you want to stop hearing about this disease all the time, then as soon as you can get a vaccine appointment, take the goddamn vaccine.
This is the only way to have a normal season, to talk about packed houses instead of seating pods. We are, if we’re being honest here, not going to get all the way there this season:
There will still be teams that fully open their stadiums, of course, because they want to and they’ll be in regions with governments friendly to their arguments of “We want to.” The Rangers will be the first, but others will follow sooner than they should, celebrating themselves for their own courage in risking other people’s lives in order to make more money. It’s a cultural inevitability; this is how things work in America. People will get mad about it, and the people who don’t like those people will get mad that they’re getting mad, and nothing will change. Aubrey Huff will have the stupidest possible take on the subject, any subject, no matter what it is.
This part, at least, is normal. Stadiums and clubhouses might not look normal, at least not yet, but our media ecosystem and absurd attention-seeking behavior is in midseason form. Nature is healing. Baseball isn’t the virus, but there’s a whole lot of virus inside of it. In that way, at least, the season’s as regular as it gets.