Keeping safe when the boss is putting you in danger
INSIDER INFO: The Giants clubhouse has licorice in it
I don’t want to name drop here, but I have personally been looked at by Mike Murphy.
Murph is the most beloved man at Oracle Park. He started as a bat boy for the San Francisco Seals in 1954, was the Giants bay boy for their first two years in San Francisco, became visiting clubhouse attendant when Candlestick opened in 1960, and graduated to running the home clubhouse in 1980. He is an inextricable part of San Francisco Giants lore, and when ex-Giants come back to 3rd and King, they make a pilgrimage to come see him. He is a living legend.
He’s also 78 years old. which puts him right smack in the high risk zone for COVID-19. So if he’s in the clubhouse this year when games are played, he could die.
Now, Murph isn’t likely to be in any danger — he’s now the “clubhouse manager emeritus” and the Giants, presumably, will allow him to stay home — but there are plenty of people who will be. Baseball lifers, like Murph, sure, but also younger clubbies, or the people who cook, or the people who do the laundry, or the people who clean the dugouts and bathrooms, or the people on the grounds crew.
If there is anyone else in the stadium with COVID, these are all people who will, in the course of doing their jobs, be exposed to it. So when I said last week that MLB will just sweep a positive test under the rug and pretend it’s fine, these are the people who will be most affected. If Tony Watson shows up one day and tests positive for COVID, Scott Harris and Yeshayah Goldfarb and (scans the page of front office employees for someone I’ve never heard of) Clara Ho-Frawley will be able to do their jobs without interacting with him or anyone who interacts with him.
Dieter, the German immigrant who does the team’s laundry and also who was made up for this paragraph, will have to touch Typhoid Tony’s clothes and be in the same room as him. That’s bad news for Dieter and his two roommates, Hans and Bjorn. Bjorn is such a character too! He came to America from Sweden to make it as a stand-up comedian. I sure hope he doesn’t get sick.
Dave Groeschner will not be able to do his job from six feet away. Well, maybe he will, actually, since he got promoted and isn’t the head trainer, but Anthony Reyes, the current head trainer, will not have that luxury. A big part of Matt Chisholm’s job involves being in the clubhouse and interacting with players, coordinating media availability and taking care of their requests. It will be very hard to do that job safely, even if all the players take COVID seriously which, if we’re being honest, some of them won’t.
(It goes without saying that this all becomes exponentially worse if they allow any fans at all into the stadium, even at 5% capacity.)
And then there’s the families of everyone working at the park. There’s the extremely scary possibility that even people who survive COVID have permanent damage in their hearts and lungs from it, not a positive for anyone but especially for athletes, who push their hearts and lungs pretty hard in the course of training and playing games.
So how in the good name of fuck could the owners get together and come up with a plan to bring baseball back, and not address any of this?
This is the question. This is the obstacle. The owners’ proposal is like planning the house you’re gonna buy after you invent cold fusion without actually going to the trouble of inventing cold fusion.
It is also a telling and pathetic synecdoche of where the country is. We’re opening before we should, letting people die who don’t have to die, for the twin pillars of optics and money. We want to look like we’re getting back to normal, and the rich people in charge want to feel like they can make money again.
But there is no normal without solving the problem. If you get cancer and decline the chemo because you don’t want to lose your hair, then you die. Yes, the solution sucks and is inconvenient and you might have to do it again next year if the disease comes back, but the alternative is death, so get over it.
So if the players agree on any economic package without working out the public health aspect of it, they’re fools. It wouldn’t be that surprising if they did cave; MLBPA has a very consistent track record this century of giving ground. Hilariously, the part of the plan the union has been most vocally against has been the pure economics: the owners want to alter salaries based on revenue, which the union sees (correctly) as essentially a salary cap, which they won’t accept.
Also in the baseball-as-synecdoche trend: owners want to cut salary when revenue is down, but when revenue is up, everyone just lives with the already signed contracts. They’re privatizing profits and socializing losses. Rich people using their leverage to avoid taking losses? Doesn’t get any more American than that!
The game plan for the players has to focus on health. They need to see plans for what happens if a player tests positive, and plans for keeping ballpark workers safe, and plans for how they’re going to avoid community spread without becoming hermits who emerge from their isolated hotel rooms to play baseball and then return without any other human contact, including their families or people at grocery stores. And those plans need to not take tests away from the medical professionals who need them to diagnose illnesses and save lives, because we don’t have enough tests in the country to waste any on putting a sport on TV.
Without all that, not only will it be immoral to play baseball this year, but it’ll be untenable. Things will go wrong. There will be health scares, of both the overblown panic and very real variety. If nobody knows the plan for that, then the plan is chaos. So don’t give an inch on it. Don’t play without guarantees. Make sure everyone who has to work at the stadium is safe, because if not, then not only will the games be re-cancelled, but baseball will have a huge and well-deserved black eye.
And keep Murph away from the ballpark this year, for fuck’s sake.