Marlins canary in the MLB coal mine
League should shut down season
The canary in the coal mine is gasping for breath. We reject it at our own peril.
Coal miners used to take the caged little songbirds into the mines. Mines are nasty places, dank, confined, toxic. One delightful byproduct of the brutish, primitive business of coal mining is a significantly shortened life expectancy of long-time mine workers. Carbon monoxide exposure, black lung disease, trashing of the surrounding environment … a coal mine is a cancer factory.
About the only help the miners had was a canary. If the air was toxic, the bird would quickly succumb — and the sacrifice would warn the miners to get out. Technology has fortunately replaced this cruel but effective tactic now.
Published reports say the Miami Marlins had at least 13 players and coaches test positive for COVID-19 over the course of MLB’s opening weekend. The Marlins did not leave Philadelphia and postponed their scheduled Monday night home opener against a Baltimore Orioles team that just embarrassed the Red Sox. Philadelphia shortly thereafter had its Monday game with the Yankees called off.
Here we go.
The coronavirus is virulent and widespread. It doesn’t respect borders. It doesn’t respect desperate business owners who are being wiped out. It doesn’t respect political ambitions. It doesn’t respect age … ravaging the elderly, but increasingly showing that healthy people in the prime of their lives — say, professional athletes — are also vulnerable. Anti-science naysayers point to the heavy imbalance in mortality, noting (correctly) that people with underlying health conditions, and particularly people 65 or older, are the majority of victims.
But they’re not the only victims. And one would hope we’d all agree that older people aren’t “acceptable” sacrifices to this savage virus. Just because most young people seem to be better equipped to fight this thing isn’t a good enough reason to be OK exposing them to it. It’s pretty simple, really: If schools open, some kids will die.
Is that worth it?
On Sunday, Red Sox lefty starter Eduardo Rodriguez revealed that he has myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle related to the coronavirus. E-Rod tested positive for COVID-19 and went into quarantine on July 15.
Canada saw this risk in telling the Toronto Blue Jays they couldn’t play in Toronto. Deemed too risky, with opposing teams from virus hot spots Florida and New York, four teams all told, jetting in. Looks like Canada was right. Better safe than sorry.
The postponed games … this is no rainout. This isn’t some random thing that is a quirk of nature. This is a global pandemic that has, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center, infected more than 16 million people worldwide, killing almost 650,000. And it’s not over. Not close.
How do you continue a season when one team is full of call-ups? That’s not Major League Baseball. This isn’t what the return was supposed to look like. It’s pro sports, not war. In war, casualties are expected. Not in sports.
How this plays out is anyone’s guess, but even a poorly educated guess is that it doesn’t end well. Baseball, reliably, may have screwed up. There was initial talk of a bubble in Arizona and/or elsewhere. The NBA’s bubble appears to be working. Cases are down. Players are isolated and tested. There’s no travel. This is why the NHL went this way.
Baseball could be over before it really got started, and you have to ask why. The science said this was risky. Now we have proof. And the 8,000-pound gorilla that is the NFL — bigger and more important to Americans than all the other sports combined — is watching, warily. This could easily be their future. A wider outbreak in baseball will have a domino effect.
MLB called an emergency meeting on the issue early Monday afternoon. How quickly, or boldly, they move will be instructive.
Houston, we have a problem. The tepid, inconsistent measures in the U.S. — some states shut down, some did so only half-heartedly — is being wasted by the rushed return to “normal.”
There is no normal. Everything is different post-COVID. The old ways of thinking don’t work. Painful as it is: MLB needs to shut down, and write off 2020. The NFL needs to delay its season until at least October. Heck, delay it until December. They can play football in the snow and the cold.
The Marlins should change their name (not to the Miami Baseball Team). They should be forever known as the Miami Canaries. Will we hear them?