Wait ‘til next year for Major League Baseball

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I read a lot of newspapers, but I didn’t fully appreciate just how serious the coronavirus pandemic was until March 11. That’s the day that the National Basketball Association shut down its season in dramatic fashion soon after a player for the Utah Jazz tested positive. 

I figured that if the money-grubbing owners of professional sports franchises thought that this thing was dangerous enough to stop their money-making machines for, I better start taking it more seriously. 

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way and if I’m right that’s an indication of the importance of professional and big-time college sports in our lives. And I’m not even much of an NBA fan. 

So, if pro sports had that much of an impact as the virus was ramping up, what kind of signal would it send if the suspended NBA and Major League Baseball seasons were to resume or if the National Football League or NCAA football were to kick off as usual in the late summer? The answer is, nothing good. 

Still, things seem to be moving in that direction. Even smart, cautious governors like California’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Andrew Cuomo have said recently that major league sports can resume without fans and with other restrictions. That’s part of a broader move to open things up, a movement that is rapidly gathering steam. I hope I’m wrong, but I fear we’re in for a crash come June when all those increased contacts and transmissions have the two weeks or so it takes to produce symptoms. 

Resuming or starting a new season in 2020 would contribute to a growing sense that the worst of this thing is over. But responsible public health officials, like the sainted Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is a huge baseball fan, are telling us something very different. “If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to ‘Open America Again,’ then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country,” Fauci told a Senate committee May 13. “This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.”

Images of massive crowds gathering at outdoor activities over the Memorial Day weekend show a lot of people skipping over the checkpoints. 

The danger that the virus will come roaring back with a vengeance in the fall (if not earlier), just as the 1918 influenza pandemic did, should be on everyone’s mind. If the NBA, MLB, NFL and NCAA cancelled their seasons they would be doing a huge public service by signalling to everyone that we’re far from out of the woods. They would be suggesting that we need to listen to people like Fauci and Wisconsin Health Services Secretary-designee Andrea Palm and not people like President Donald Trump and Sen. Tom Tiffany, who foolishly demanded Palm’s resignation. 

I admit that I miss sports, especially baseball. But even baseball would be better off bagging this season and resuming with spring training next February. Everyone knows that there’s no crying in baseball. But spitting? Spitting is as much a part of the game as sliders and fastballs. And yet the major league owners have proposed salvaging half a season starting in July with a set of restrictions that include playing before empty stadiums and banning spitting among the players and coaches. Watching a game on TV as if it were being played in the Miami Marlins’ stadium (which is lightly attended even when there is no pandemic), and with players with full cheeks uncomfortably looking for a way to surreptitiously expectorate chew juice, isn’t my idea of a good time. 

To make matters worse, the money-grubbing owners (is it okay to use an accurate phrase twice in the same blog?) want to sneak the dreaded designated hitter into the National League game for this season only, they say. The DH has nothing at all to do with safety restrictions related to the virus, but it is an affront to baseball not to mention to everything authentic and true in the world. I don’t mean to make light of the pandemic but the designated hitter is to baseball what the coronavirus is to public health. 

The larger point is that abbreviated seasons played under all kinds of peculiar restrictions and temporary rule changes will not yield fair results or ones that are comparable to other seasons, a point that is especially important to statistics-obsessed baseball fans. 

Individual sports are another matter. NASCAR has restarted its season without fans and professional golf is scheduled to resume play next month without galleries. Tennis probably could work and why not professional bowling? Yeah, bowling. This should be especially popular in Wisconsin. 

Those sports have enough natural social distancing to reduce the risk to acceptable levels and, more importantly, they don’t have nearly the cultural influence of MLB, the NBA, the NCAA or the NFL. 

The mouthpieces for professional and big-time college sports love to go on sanctimoniously about the importance and value of their games to the broader culture and about all of the life lessons sports teaches us. Well, all right. The most important lesson they can teach us right now is that the coronavirus remains a serious health threat and that this is no time to throw in the towel on fighting it. Especially as a baseball fan, I say this with a heavy heart but let’s cancel all the 2020 team sports seasons and look forward to next year.