Gonna be tough for baseball to start if rest of nation isn’t ready
In his first inaugural address, with the nation in the grips of the Great Depression, FDR told Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. This is what major league baseball will be confronted with if and when it attempts to start its 2020 season two or three months from now.
No one knows what the landscape in America will be like come summer. It is MLB’s fervent hope the coronavirus will be but a memory, albeit a horrible one; that the peak, especially in places like New York, New Jersey, Michigan etc. will have been reached by early May, and by late June people are going to want to be out and about again. But will they?
Right now, it is awfully hard to imagine thousands of people crowding their way onto the subways and going to Citi Field, in the shadow of Elmhurst, Queens, where they’re presently hauling body bags by the dozens out of the hospitals. Just as it’s hard to imagine thousands of people trekking to Cooperstown and sitting and sweating side-by-side in the field beyond the Clark Sports Center for Derek Jeter’s Hallof-Fame induction.
We just don’t know what the environment will be like, but make no mistake, MLB is not yet thinking about starting up a season in which there would be no fans in the ballparks. Attendance is where their biggest revenues come from. And yet, their first of three guidelines for the resumption of play is “no governmental edicts on mass gatherings that would prevent teams for playing in their home stadiums.”
Do we really believe the government is going to relax its social distancing guidelines once the pandemic hopefully has subsided in two months? And, if so, how much? More to the point, how long will it take for fans/people themselves to feel comfortable being in crowds?
Fear itself.
The players want to play because they want to get paid, so much so they’re willing to play in empty stadiums. But this so-called “Wasserman Plan” being floated by the agent, Casey Wasserman, and the union, in which they would play the season in four Arizona spring training complexes with no fans in attendance is never going to fly with the owners. Unless, of course, the players are willing to play for the minimum wage, which they are not. They want full salaries even though the owners would have no attendance revenue from which to pay them.
The owners do not appear to have any appetite for a season with empty stadiums. One baseball executive said to me if the social distancing guidelines remain in effect for the foreseeable future, the clubs could limit attendance in some way. He didn’t say, given the state of the economy, whether fans will even be able to afford to go to games.
But let’s say they do start the season in some way, with empty or half-filled stadiums. They’ve already said the rosters will be expanded by three or four extra players, meaning extra trainers and conditioning people will be necessary, making for even tighter quarters in the clubhouses and the team charters. And what happens when a player — or players — on the team contracts the virus? By what’s happening right now, the whole team would have to be quarantined and, therefore, unavailable to complete the schedule.
There’s also going to be a problem with social distancing within the ballparks — the press box, the TV and radio booths — where people are crammed right next to each other. Somebody asked me about social distancing and the home plate umpire. Would home plate umpires have to wear hazmat suits? Or will MLB have to implement the robot home plate umpires a year ahead of schedule?
And what about the minor leagues? They, especially, cannot sustain a season with empty ballparks. Even though the major leagues pay the players’ salaries, the minor leagues are responsible for all the far greater travel and stadium maintenance costs. It may just be, no matter what, Commissioner Rob Manfred is going to get his way for eliminating 42 minor league teams. Thanks to coronavirus, many of them may go out of business by themselves.
Much as everyone may want a baseball season, until the country can get a grip on this pandemic, it’s right now hard to see how it can be implemented. Especially when among all the obstacles MLB may be facing, there is the fear itself.