So baseball is coming back.
Reporters have spent the last couple days running through the many, many alterations to the sport’s rules that will come in 2020 (Universal DH! 30-man roster and 30-man taxi squad to start out! The 4th inning will be replaced by the Hope Real Hard Not To Get Sick inning!), just thankful that they have something to report on that isn’t labor relations. As I have been All Labor All The Time here at the ol’ newsletter, I understand this position. Just give us something. Please, give us something.
Giving us this particular something is a terrible idea.
The country is not ready to bring back sports. I don’t mean emotionally unready — we remain emotionally ready to do literally everything that makes our lives the tiniest amount of better, no matter the cost to ourselves or others. No, just glancing at the test America filled out for our Reopening Readiness midterm, we wrote “LET’S FUCKIN DO IT” as our name and didn’t bother with any of the actual questions.
Our cases are drastically shooting up. The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, who had once ridiculed California and New York for having Democratic governors, accurate budget projections, and higher COVID numbers, is now facing a crisis.
To my mind, it is tough to reconcile the facts of what we have been facing in this country for months, and will continue to face for an unfortunately long time, with the idea that it’s fine to have large gatherings for the purpose of frivolity. That’s an inherently unserious response for unserious people cosplaying as adults, and baseball is leaning on it hard.
“We’ll take every precaution,” they say, omitting the precaution of not playing. “We’re listening to medical experts,” they say, apparently not hearing the medical experts tell them to avoid unnecessary contact with others. “We’re traveling to multiple large metro areas over the course of our 60-game season,” they say, because apparently they live on a different world than the rest of us?
For baseball to come back safely, America needed to progress against the virus, not regress. We chose the latter course — not everyone, but enough people are refusing to wear masks or make any sacrifice at all to make this a choice — and baseball is coming back anyway. This is not an error in judgment because it’s not an error: The people in charge know the risks, and since they’re not the ones taking them and they’ll get more money if others do, then the risks are fine. Everybody’s eyes are open here.
And that makes it worse. The whole grand plan to come back, which will leave players sick, will continue. Charlie Blackmon and a couple teammates have COVID? Yikes, rough, see ya in a couple weeks there, buddy. Four members of the Sacramento Kings test positive? Well, they’ll all eventually be in the same hotel anyway, so no harm, no foul. There are reports of mystery Blue Jays and mystery Braves and mystery Marlins who are coming down with it? Well, you win some, you lose some.
This situation is untenable and we are doing less tenning by the day. Baseball was desperate for a positive PR push, so they eventually managed to mandate a season and call it a triumph before a pitch was thrown. But there’s no PR win that obscures more than 124,000 Americans dead, no way to tell the story that makes this season anything other than a cynical joke. This is a bad idea and it will end badly. Anyone can see it. Some are choosing not to.