It has been around seven months since COVID became the defining aspect of American life. As of 10:45 PM on Wednesday night, the US has seen 9.1 million cases, with just shy of 3 million of those being active. 233,000 Americans have died from it, and every weekday we’re adding another thousand dead to that total. We registered another 81,000 new cases yesterday, and 75,000 the day before that. This thing is not going away on its own.
(All numbers come from this site, by the way)
Justin Turner, the Dodgers’ third baseman and third-rate Tormund Giantsbane cosplayer, had an inconclusive COVID test come back in the second inning last night. He had a positive one come back in the seventh, at which point he was removed from the game; after the Dodgers won the World Series, he came back on the field to celebrate with his teammates. He won a World Series! He might never do that again! He had to celebrate! These exclamation points are sarcastic but don’t let that stop you from reading this paragraph the way you want to!
There are a lot of extremely fair questions being asked about the entire Turner situation. Why was Turner allowed to play at all after an inconclusive test? How did he even get COVID if he’s in a bubble? And the big one: just why in the good name of fuck was he allowed to come back on the field?
Let me answer them all: MLB was scared to overtly alter the outcome of the Series, MLB never actually ran a bubble, and he wanted to. Boy, that was easy! I should do this for a living.
It’s the third point that I want to talk about, though. Because even if you grumble your way through MLB stretching its own rules to keep Turner in the game, even if you willfully overlook how quarter-assed their idea of a bubble was — there were literally fans staying at the team hotel, which immediately made the whole thing Not A Bubble — you still have to cope with the absolute dereliction of duty that was Turner returning to the field.
“We tried to stop him,” MLB told anyone who would listen. “But he insisted.” Baseball, you see, is absolutely powerless in the face of a guy who wants to do something. Baseball could not dream of physically stopping Justin Turner from going onto a baseball field, from sending him back to his hotel room the instant that positive test came back, from actually doing their goddamn jobs.
MLB made the rules, and as soon as the last pitch was thrown in its flagship event, it threw up its hands and declared, “Well that’s that then.” Baseball never cared about player safety for the sake of player safety; it cared about player safety because players getting COVID would be extremely bad PR and also there might be legal consequences. The unbridled apathy with which they handled Turner would be proof enough of all of that, if every decision they made since May wasn’t already proof enough of all of that.
It would be easy to absolve Turner of his part in this, and even though I don’t have a subscription, it’s my understanding that Defector already did something like that. But that’s bullshit. Justin Turner is an adult human person who is fully capable of understanding the consequences of his decisions. And this, right here, is a hell of a decision:
What it came down to, for Turner, was this: He had something he wanted to do, and if he took COVID seriously he wouldn’t be able to do it, so he didn’t take it seriously. He chose to do the thing he wanted, without a mask on, because that’s how he’d always pictured it. He put his teammates and his coaches and his teammates’ and coaches’ families in danger — not just danger of losing their lives but of long-term respiratory or cardiovascular or neurological issues — because he was going to live his dream, consequences be damned.
This is exactly the kind of behavior that has made our country’s outbreak so disastrous. There is enough information out there in the world that everyone knows what to do and what not to do, but not everyone is doing it. For some, it’s a political issue — Democrats say wear masks so Republicans refuse. Some point to easily debunked pseudoscience — the “masks make it worse” crowd or the “It has a 99.9% survival rate” gang, as two patently absurd examples based on absolute garbage. But there’s one unifying principle at the root of all the resistance to the science on COVID: How Dare You Tell Me What To Do.
This is why public health directors are getting death threats and resigning. This is why governors and the president are blaming the high numbers on increased testing, as if increased testing alone would, say, cause hospital admissions to spike. This is why there are so many conspiracy theories about how every bit of this is a left-wing plot to control your freedom brain somehow and for some reason. It’s because If You Tell Me Not To Do Something I Want To Do Then You’re Bad And Wrong.
Justin Turner isn’t the cause of this attitude, of course, but he’s more than a symptom too. He’s an active participant. He chose to potentially hurt others so he could get what he wanted. It is selfish, reckless, irresponsible behavior. It is also what’s happening in every corner of the country. He’s taking the path of so many others. It’s their fault for leading him there. It’s also his fault for following.