Squeezing blood from a stone
The stone is the current state of the world. The blood is baseball. It's a metaphor, is what I'm getting at.
It’s not that I want to spend every Tuesday and Thursday writing in my baseball newsletter about how we shouldn’t have baseball this year. I would prefer for baseball to be an enjoyable thing that is only immoral in its labor relations and structural racism, like the good, American institution that it is. I would really, genuinely love it if right now, I were getting extremely mad at the Dodgers for having some spectacular rookie who’d never made a single prospect list hitting .320/.435/.580 in 150 PAs. That would be fantastic.
Alas, COVID-19. Alas, alas.
It’s been a whirlwind of coronavirus-related activity since the weekend started, and all of the news has been troubling. Here’s a sample:
Multiple players on every team have tested positive for coronavirus — two “individuals” yesterday on the Giants, to go along with Hunter Bishop and Luis Madero, who had already tested positive
Big name players are starting to opt out of the season because it’s not worth it, with David Price and Nick Markakis being two of the bigger names to choose not to play over the weekend
There are delays in getting the tests back from the one lab MLB uses for testing, with the A’s, Angels, Astros, and Nationals all having to delay practices because they have no idea whether anyone has tested positive
Players such as Mike Trout, Kris Bryant, and Buster Posey, who are still in camps, are all openly questioning whether it’s worth it to play a season under these circumstances
And just for funsies, the US has seen at least 45,000 new cases each day in July
On the other hand, this is the news from four whole days. That’s one day short of a full workweek! No wonder a couple of small oopsies have cropped up.
There were, once, scenarios in which playing was a not impossible idea. When it looked like players could be sequestered in Spring Training sites in Arizona and Florida, avoiding some of the risk involved in travelling all over the country, that was…well, also a bad idea, but technically feasible! When the country shut down, everyone geared up for the second part of The Coronavirus Plan, where the country would start mass testing and really go wild on the contact tracing. That would have meant baseball was possible, like it is in Korea. We, uh, didn’t end up doing that.
Even when MLB released its testing plan, as flawed as it was, as long as you squinted real hard and Nothing Went Wrong, it might have been workable.
Okay, probably not, but it sure was fun to lie to ourselves, wasn’t it?
Anyway, things have already gone wrong. They are going to keep going wrong. The massive number of cases in the country means there’s no safe place to go, the players who have already tested positive are signs that it’s extremely difficult for everyone to avoid the virus, the delay in testing returning results means that a player could be infected and contagious and infect others before he even knows it. The players, who are physically capable of noticing things, are noticing this; some have already opted out, some will when it gets worse.
It is a when, by the way, not an if. It will get worse. Probably tomorrow, and then probably again on Wednesday, and then once more on Thursday it’ll get worse. That’s the way things are going right now, and any efforts to slow things down that started last week won’t begin to bear fruit until next week.
In the midst of all that disease and chaos, baseball is going to give it the old college try. They’re not alone in this; the NBA and NHL will also be starting up in a few weeks, but this isn’t a basketball or hockey newsletter, so someone else can write all about their bad ideas.
No, we’re here to talk about baseball and its badly thought out ideas. Even if they do press on and play a season, there will be a team on which half the players get Covid all at once and they have to turn over 15 spots on their roster. Sure, they’ll have the players stashed away in their camps, but if you’re playing a team of AAA guys, what is that game even worth? It’ll be a game played against a minor league team with no fans watching in the middle of a pandemic with everyone on both teams hoping they don’t have it.
And that’s the best case scenario for the league! In this best case scenario, it only happens to one team and the league keeps operating. That’s virtually guaranteed not to happen.
There is no upside in this. There’s no satisfying ending. There’s just baseball players going through the motions until they’re told to stop. This is a shortened season born of optimism that the world would get better. The world has not gotten better. It’s pretty obvious what to do with the season.