Despite the massive influence that this newsletter has in the sports world, baseball is still charging ahead with its plan to play the 2020 season, looking criticisms in the eye and confidently declaring, “No, it’ll be fine” to all of them, possibly without listening to those criticisms.
I suppose it’s nice that baseball is so presidential.
This decision comes with consequences. There is the inevitable bad PR from the players who will test positive as the season goes on, and the lack of legitimacy of the season itself, for two examples. Or we could combine them into one example, like Astros GM James Click did yesterday:
“My mind always just goes to ‘We need to stay healthy.’ I really do think whichever team has the fewest cases of coronavirus is going to win,” said first-year Astros general manager James Click, discussing the new definition of success in this season plagued by COVID-19.
I saw a few people criticizing him for saying that, but it’s almost assuredly true. Because our country is being wracked by COVID-19, our baseball teams will also be wracked by COVID-19. Whichever team is least wracked, and is able to play established major leaguers against the minor league fill ins of their opponents, will have a massive advantage.
That’s it. That’s the game. In a sport that has become obsessed with finding minute edges in order to exploit them, the biggest edge you can get will have nothing to do with platoon advantages or roster shenanigans. It’ll just come down to who catches the pandemic raging through the country and who doesn’t.
It’s hard to be too invested in that. If you want to stretch your way into an “Anything can happen!” narrative, then those are words that you are physically capable of thinking, and you should take a moment and be proud of yourself for that. Way to go, you! You did it!
But in a normal season, there’s an inherent meaning behind “Anything can happen!” that doesn’t apply here. You’ll look back on it with pride when your lowly Giants team still manages to score 4 runs in 5 innings off Clayton Kershaw. You’ll cherish the memory of a late-inning rally against a strong Padres bullpen. You’ll have children just so you can tell them the story of the 3-game series in Coors Field when the Giants only allowed 2 runs.
But in 2020? They only scored those runs off Kershaw because a minor league fill-in in the outfield broke the wrong way on what should have been a routine inning-ending fly ball. That Padres bullpen? 3 of them just arrived that day because Kirby Yates, Matt Strahm, and Drew Pomeranz all tested positive after the previous day’s game. That vaunted Rockies lineup in Coors Field? Missing most of its regulars.
What satisfaction is there in those victories? What exactly is the thing you’re celebrating there? That the Giants were less diseased than their opponents? That the Giants were able to come together as a team, if only because their test results came back faster than the test results from a large part of the league, allowing them an almost full complement of practices? That the Giants distracted you from the outside world moderately better than their opponents?
Even in the best case scenario, this season will be illegitimate. There is no way around it, no mental gymnastics to dodge it. MLB is basically throwing baseball at you and screaming, “You like stuff? Here’s some stuff!” It’s a cynical, doomed enterprise, and if there’s a point to it, I sure can’t see what it is.