Season’s end already?
The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Baseball has proven this adage over and over again. Take the 1969 New York Mets besting the Baltimore Orioles. Please. Or Bill Buckner’s fielding in the 1986 World Series. Or maybe the idiot who thought 10-cent beer night in Cleveland in 1974 was a wonderful idea. Just when Major League Baseball looks predictable and stodgy (a sport that fosters endless debate over the exact dimensions of the strike zone is surely leaning in that direction), somebody throws a curve. And then came the pandemic. On Monday and Tuesday nights, the Baltimore Orioles were set to play the Florida Marlins in Miami in only their fourth and fifth games scheduled for the pandemic-shortened season. The games were “postponed” by the coronavirus. Not because anyone involved was unaware the virus existed but because Marlins games are threatening to become their own super-spreader events. At least 17 players and club staff have reportedly tested positive.
Make no mistake, we have been rooting for MLB action for months, the return of the Orioles and the other franchises a much-needed relief for stuckat-home sports fans already weary of watching “encore” performances from baseball seasons past. But we could not have predicted that three games into a 60-game season, the whole enterprise would look to be on the verge of coming apart at the seams.
We do not relish the prospect of calling off the season entirely (even though it would leave the lowly Orioles with a truly improbable winning record) but turning baseball into a public health fiasco would be so much worse—a symbol of this nation’s botched covid-19 response broadcast large. Baseball should be prepared to do that if a lot more players are sidelined. How long before star players drop out rather than show up in Miami, for example? Or teams have to field minor leaguers? Or what happens the day there’s a fatality? We mourn a life lost to cable television ratings. It’s one thing to risk lives for the greater good, it’s another to do so for the nation’s entertainment. The season was already asterisk-loaded.