Forget about the NFL season; it’s never going to happen.
The idea of attempting a college football season — putting amateur athletes at risk — is obscenely unthinkable.
Within days, or a couple of weeks, we also may find out whether it is feasible for the NBA, in its Florida bubble, or the NHL, playing in Canada, to finish a truncated season and crown a champion.
Sure, none of that is certain, but Monday morning’s news that at least 14 members of the Miami Marlins and their staff have tested positive for the novel coronavirus in recent days was chilling. The immediate consequences were the postponements of the Marlins’ home opener against the Orioles and the Phillies’ home game against the Yankees, who would have been occupying the clubhouse those Marlins just showered and dressed in Sunday.
The wider effect: “Back-to-normal,” or even semi-normal, in sports was shattered, just days after being reintroduced.
What does this mean?
Some events have ambiguous consequences. We won’t know their impact for some time. But in rare cases, one event may have enormous impact, just as the positive virus test for the NBA’s Ruby Gobert in mid-March resulted in the shutdown of every major sport within 48 hours.
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This is such a moment — but perhaps bigger. Within a day, we may see the cancellation of the MLB season.
Right now, I would be in favor of it.
Why are we here? The answer is pretty simple, yet inexplicably unacknowledged in wide swaths of this country: The pandemic is in control, and it stays in control until you stop it, suppress it, dominate it and crush “the curve."
America has not come within a million miles of that outcome — though many other countries have.
As I pointed out in a column last week, when a league says, “Given what we are seeing with Covid-19 hitting our teams, maybe we should cancel the season,” the correct response is “get rid of the word ‘maybe.’” The entire American experience of this pandemic has been: Stay ahead of this virus or it will crush you. Try to outrun it, hide from it, say it’s not so bad and will go away.
It just breeds a disaster.
Now that disaster has hit MLB just five days into its season. The Cincinnati Reds also have multiple positive tests. The Atlanta Braves have been without both their catchers who have symptoms, though no positive tests. Nationals star Juan Soto is inactive after a positive test.
Do we need a longer list?
Underneath all the discussions and elaborate plans to reopen various sports, from MLB, NBA and NHL now to the NFL and college football by the end of next month, has been one naive assumption: If the virus hit a team, it would infect one or two players. Maybe three. But the sense was things still would be “manageable.” You could still “field a team.”
When did this become the highest of all human goals?
The danger and the damage would not be “too bad.” In this, we see American’s national tendency toward willful ignorance being played out on a small, crystal-clear stage so everyone can get the message.
For months, we have watched healthy people, mostly young, swarm into bars or hit the beaches with an apparent sense that “community spread” was a fiction or not something that applied to them. Maybe, the fantasy went, one person in the wrong bar would get the virus.
Now, we learn differently. Now we see the truth.
You can’t be more healthy, as a group, than a professional baseball team. You can’t be much better protected or tested more often than an MLB team. The Marlins are close to the safest possible case. And right now, less than a week into their season, at least half of the team has the coronavirus!
That is what is meant by “community spread.” That is what is meant by an “outbreak” in an epidemic. All of us have worried that one or two players — or people in the MLB community — would have “bad outcomes” from the virus if a 60-game season was played. Time to blow up that assumption. If half of the Marlin team can test positive within a few days, then the scale of danger to health — the number of people who may get sick and severity of the damage they may suffer, including 27-year-old pro athletes — just shot through the ceiling. Our assumptions, well-intentioned, have been blown to pieces. And in short order, so will the seasons of one, or perhaps several, of our sports.
“The Marlins” are just the latest — but one of the most vivid — illustrations of what America is facing. And how little we are willing to take seriously the true measure of our fearsome enemy.
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July 27, 2020 at 11:38PM
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Every sport has a coronavirus plan. MLB's lasted four days. - MSN Money
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