Los Angeles should not be hosting any kind of sporting event right now. Why not? Well, I’m glad you asked:
Miami should not be hosting any kind of sporting event right now. Why not? I’m glad you asked.
The Chinese city of Wuhan, the original epicenter of the coronavirus crisis, went into a 76-day lockdown in late January after a deadly outbreak infected and killed thousands. The first known cases of the virus were first detected in the city in December and by mid-April officials reported more than 50,000 infections. Miami-Dade County has recorded more than 64,000 infections so far, according to state data.
In the past 13 days, Miami-Dade County has seen staggering increases in the number of COVID-19 patients being hospitalized (68%), in the number of Intensive Care Unit beds being used (69%) and in the use of ventilators (109%), the Miami-Dade County Government reported.
Forty-eight Florida hospitals, including eight in Miami-Dade, have reached their ICU capacity, according to the Agency for Health Care Administration.
Houston — and all of Texas, if we’re being honest, should not be hosting any kind of sporting event right now. Why not? I’m glad you asked:
Atlanta should not be…eh, let’s skip the intro and get to the tweet.
Now, I can’t necessarily do a version of that paragraph for every major league city. Seattle is doing reasonably well, as is San Francisco. It looks like New York is mostly on the other side of its outbreak. The news is not uniformly disastrous in every big city across the country.
But what if it was? Would that be enough for MLB to cancel its season?
I honestly don’t think it would be. It’s hard to imagine Major League Baseball canceling the season. When there was no baseball, inertia was firmly on Team Don’t Play. How could the league possibly manage the logistics of playing a legitimate season in a pandemic, with all the health protocols and safety precautions they’d have to enact? Why, the very concept seemed ludicrous!
But now, everything has started up. The very concept still seems ludicrous — we’ve been hearing about testing lags for more than a week, for one example — and it doesn’t matter. Inertia switched sides to Team Play. The wheels are in motion, so the whole dang car is rolling along towards its destination, no matter how stupid of a place it is to go to.
From the outside, it seems as if the hardest part of restarting baseball was deciding to restart baseball. With that decision in the past, things just kind of take care of themselves. People start talking about COVID in terms of how it affects things on the field. People talk about the challenges of putting on a game — piping in crowd noise and having cardboard cutouts and making some players sit in the stands. All these things create buy-in for the season, an ingrained assumption that sure, of course they’re going to play, it’s just a matter of figuring out how, in a way that is so, so easy to just not question.
The outside world is significantly worse off than baseball expected when they decided to start the season. It seems like there’s no external outbreak level that will make them rethink the whole idea. There’s money to be made, after all, and the owners will be damned if they don’t make that money. It’s the principle of the thing.
So back to the central question: What would it take to cancel the season? I can tell you the answer Rob Manfred gave in his notorious “It was always going to be 60 games” interview. When Dan Patrick asked Manfred how long he’d be comfortable pausing the season in case a team got infected, he said this:
“I don’t have a firm number of days in mind. I think the way that I think about it, Dan, is in the vein of competitive integrity. In a 60 game season, if we have a team or two that’s really decimated with the number of people who have the virus and can’t play for any significant period of time, it can have a real impact on the competition and we have to think very, very hard about what we’re doing.”
So there’s one answer. If an entire team gets it, or close enough to an entire team that playing against that team would be a joke, then it’s possible Manfred would call off the season. But if 3 or 4 Padres pick up some ‘rona in LA, and then head into San Francisco and spread it around a little bit, well, hey, that doesn’t affect the competitive integrity of the game. Play ball!
This is an absurdly high bar set by someone who is looking for reasons to do the thing he wants to do. It is extremely likely that playing will get people sick; if not players, then ballpark support staff or hotel workers. It just doesn’t matter to baseball because baseball does not think it will ever be blamed. It looks good for baseball to be around and bad for it to not be around, even though it is much better for minimizing the spread of COVID-19 for it to not be around.
Baseball should be listening to public health officials. Instead, baseball is thinking about PR. There’s something so purely American about that that you almost have to respect it.