Opinion | Major League Baseball fails to take serious pandemic precautions
Joe Perrino, Sports Editor
After months spent locked away in our homes without any sports to dull the pain, live sports are finally back. In a moment of sheer excitement, I purchased a fan cutout (to replace actual fans in the stands) at Oracle Park in San Francisco for $107.42 including tax, so at least my spiritual self could be surrounded by the dense fog at a Giants game.
Yet, within a month, my cutout may no longer be watching any baseball.
Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL) have started or restarted their seasons in the past month. Some of these leagues have been handling their restarts well, taking the safety of players into account rather than solely revenue.
The MLB, on the other hand, took the “South Park” Canadian approach saying, “We want more money.”
This mess started way back in May, when the MLB and Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) sent season proposals back and forth with little negotiation coming from either side. Team owners wanted fewer games to be played in order to trim the salaries of their players and keep that extra cash in their pockets. The MLBPA vouched for the complete opposite – a long season so players could make most of their traditional salaries. In the end, after around a month of negotiations and MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred contradicting himself multiple times on the status of the season, the two organizations agreed to a 60-game season beginning July 23.
Questions then arose about players’ safety, of course, because the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t exactly vanished into thin air. And this is where the MLB dug themselves into a big hole.
Instead of creating a “bubble” situation like the NBA did – secluding players in a Disney World resort with their teammates and coaches, testing them everyday in order to weed out and isolate any cases of the virus – the MLB altered the schedule so teams wouldn’t have to travel outside of their region to play a game. It sounds OK in theory, but when broken down, players are still traveling long distances – for example, 2,300 miles for a game between the Seattle Mariners and Houston Astros – to play divisional series. Plus, with no bubble to contain them, players are free to roam around their hotels so long as they stay with their teammates and out of populated areas – but there’s no real way to enforce that.
Surprise! Over the course of eight days in the midst of the season’s restart, 18 (yes, 18) players and two coaches on the Miami Marlins tested positive for COVID-19. The MLB forced them and their recent opponent Philadelphia Phillies to sit out for nine games. As sports personality Stephen A. Smith would say, “This is blasphemous!”
So, what’s next? Will the league ever implement strict rules to keep players and coaches quarantined? How many more players have to get sick for something to be done? Will it take a superstar getting sick? A death?
COVID-19 is not the flu. While the majority of a young and healthy population may only experience flu-like symptoms or even be asymptomatic, the virus can affect everyone. And until the MLB truly takes this seriously, there will only be more outbreaks.
As I sit here, socially distanced in my room, I beg the MLB to take a step back and assess the severity of what’s going on. Even as someone who purchased an in-stadium cutout, I would rather see the safety of players, coaches and their families taken into account, than a cardboard version of myself on TV. Plus, the sooner this pandemic is over, the sooner I can spend $107.42 on tickets instead.