Sports in the time of cholera
Yes, I know that COVID-19 is extremely different from cholera. No, I've never read the book that this is a reference to. Please stop your legitimate criticisms of this title.
So America might be facing a tiny, uh, global pandemic
This isn’t what I wanted to talk about today, or ever, but I don’t really see what else I can do. It would feel weird to just write about Joe McCarthy and the unknowability of either the past or the future while ignoring the fact that, for all we know, fans won’t even be able to go to games early this year.
The Sharks’ next three home games will not be played in front of crowds at the Shark Tank. Major League Baseball has temporarily (we hope!) banned reporters from the clubhouse. San Francisco directed the Warriors to postpone their games (they deferred to NBA commissioner Adam Silver, who has not authorized the postponements). The entire nation of Italy shut itself down 10 days after everything was basically fine. There are a lot of people who are absolutely terrified, and a good number of them are making decisions.
And still, here’s Joe McCarthy, owner of a wRC+ of 19 as a Sacramento River Cat, with a non-zero shot at making the team after surviving the camp’s first Cut Day. Boy, let’s talk about that!
There is a possibility that this all goes away. It’s the possibility that COVID-19 never gets a real foothold in the United States and eventually works its way through Europe and Asia, and it becomes a non-issue. Things go back to normal. People talk about “the coronavirus” like they talk about SARS: a disease that got a lot of hype but that didn’t end the world.
COVID-19 has already killed significantly more people worldwide than SARS ever did, but that would still be the narrative.
But there’s also a possibility it doesn’t. That’s the one that’s been on everyone’s mind for weeks now, and it’s the reason that Stanford cancelled classes and SXSW lowered itself into that vat of molten steel. There might be no baseball, or weird no-crowd baseball, in our near future. Certainly the players won’t be interacting with fans anytime soon — they have their orders there, and they’re more than happy to follow them — but who knows if there will even be fans at all?
Other counties or municipalities might start following Santa Clara County’s lead and ban public gatherings of more than 1,000 people. Then what? Teams lose money, fans lose interest, but people don’t die. Later, in the future, after everything is back to normal, people start treating COVID-19 like Y2K: a joke that we never had to be worried about, a prime example of media hype run amok.
But that hides the truth about Y2K and the truth about the hopeful future where COVID-19 is contained: the reason these things were not problems is that people worked extremely hard for them to not be problems. Hundreds of hours rewriting code is certainly less stressful than hundreds of hours cooped up in your house hoping you don’t die of the new superplague, but in both cases the extreme measures helped avert disaster.
Or they didn’t! That’s what people will think: We were PROMISED a trip to the fireworks factory where we could blow off our hands and faces, but HERE WE ARE, not at the fireworks factory, with hands and faces still VERY MUCH attached.
MLB could do nothing and take its chances, but that approach is nothing but downside, both legally and can-you-sleep-at-nightily. So if this virus keeps on dominating headlines, and epidemiologists keep saying, “Take this seriously,” then they won’t really have a choice but to look at drastic options to keep people from coming to games and getting themselves sick.
People will not be fans of cancelling/postponing/keeping stadiums empty, and as time goes on and people forget the sheer panic in people’s minds right now, it will seem even less defensible. But if MLB faces that decision, the best-case scenario is for that to happen, even if conventional wisdom is wrong about it 10 years from now.