Let pros play, but keep kids off fields
A week from Friday, the Astros will host the Seattle Mariners at Minute Maid Park.
For 100 bucks, you can have a seat at the game. Well, not you, but a facsimile, sans the heartbeat and breathing.
The latter is key, of course. People breathing on others is a method of transmission of COVID-19, the disease that has disrupted sports — and just about everything else — as we know it.
Your life-size cardboard representative will be relegated to outfield seats and presumably will not bring harm to others.
Sadly, this is about as close as fans will get to the baseball field this season.
You shouldn’t want to be closer.
It is a given that big-time sports in 2020 will not look anything like it has in the past. Thankfully, how close of a look
you get will not be left up to you.
Not that we didn’t already know this, but the kicking and screaming we have seen from the anti-mask crowd tells us some of you can’t be trusted to make smart decisions.
Remember when you couldn’t give Astros tickets away a few years ago?
If the Astros opened all seats for sale at Minute Maid Park, they would draw a huge crowd for opening day. If they offered free tickets, the stadium would be standing room only.
The same would be true for NRG Stadium.
It would be a COVID-19 party. The powers that be shouldn’t allow that.
Protecting you from yourself infringes upon your freedom to hurt yourself, but in some cases, it must be done to keep you from doing harm to others.
Restrictions on seats in a row, lower-level seats blocked off, and mask requirements have all been announced at NFL stadiums for the fall.
It is amazing we’re debating whether to copy those patterns on lower levels.
As for professional athletes, most will choose to play. They’re pros and play for professional franchises. They know the risks.
Plus, pro leagues can pay a fortune for incessant testing to try to protect their players and coaches.
College sports can follow the professional model to a degree, but only if there is a dramatic fall in coronavirus cases should we even consider allowing high school sports this fall.
Football and volleyball practices are supposed to start in a couple weeks. We might as well postpone those now.
With professional teams, billion-dollar operations, having such difficulty planning for their seasons, it is inconceivable that school districts will figure out a way to safely conduct fall sports.
Here is where otherwise reasonable people will want to debate the meaning of the word safe.
The “argument” that high school football should go on because a teenager has as good a chance at getting struck by lightning as dying from COVID-19 is a pitiful one. Especially when made by a parent.
If a parent allowed (or forced) a kid to stay on a golf course during a lightning storm, we would call the Department of Family and Protective Services to report them for potential abuse.
Understandably, the NFL, MLB and the NBA are doing all they can to figure out how to play the games.
Money rules those worlds.
They will sell every seat they can and put a cardboard cutout of you in others if possible.
Granted, the Astros are using this as a fundraising tool for a worthy cause, but eventually, they will ask you to pay for a seat for the real you.
High schools shouldn’t try so hard. Let’s worry about safely getting students back into classrooms before we think about sports.
Listen to the experts who say football, in the midst of a global pandemic, could be disastrous.
There are around 165,000 high school football players in Texas. How many coronavirus lightning strikes would be acceptable?
If “only” one or two high school football players contracted the disease and died, would playing the season have been worth it?
If you believe so, are you volunteering your child or someone else’s?