Times like these expose a wrong-way world
Definition of essential does not include .220-hitting shortstops or a $2 million role player
Muddling through an eighth consecutive week without competition, the worthy argument that sports are an essential part of the American culture is struggling to maintain its resonance.
With more U.S. citizens dead from COVID-19 in the past three months than perished in the war in Vietnam over most of 20 years, the notion that we desperately need the seasonal distractions of swinging bats, dribbling balls, mucking it up in hockey’s corners and the promise of a typically destructive football season four months off seems harder and harder to articulate.
It’s still worth pointing out that some very large brains successfully have emphasized this very point throughout history, perhaps most notably the brain carried around by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose letter to then-baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis near the start of U.S. involvement in World War II set the standard for persuasion on such matters.
“I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going,” FDR said, in part, just prior to spring training in 1942. “There will be fewer people unemployed and everybody will be working
longer hours and harder than ever before.
“And that means they ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than ever before.”
(My favorite part of it, here omitted, is FDR’s then-accurate observation that a baseball game can be played in two or two-and-half hours. If he only knew).
Were he alive today, however, I suspect FDR’s viewpoint would be closer to that of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who in an interview with The New York Times this past week issued a very serious qualification for anyone conspiring to restart baseball.
Until the day comes, the eminent immunologist indicated, that there are enough tests that leagues can use them without taking them out of the hands of those who need them for purposes more important than sporting events, it might seem unlikely any such restart plans can be launched.
But it’s not so much about which parts of our culture are and are not essential; it’s more about who is essential, and this elongated sports stoppage has made it pretty clear. Doctors and nurses and truckers and food suppliers and police officers and paramedics and prison staffers and nursing home workers and delivery people are essential. Shortstops and power forwards and goalies and linebackers and umpires and coaches and mascots and cheerleaders much less so.
This obvious dichotomy, we’ve long established, is rarely reflected in things such as salary and respect. We didn’t need 9/11 to impress upon us that when buildings explode into flames and the world looks like it is ending, blue-collar workers run up those steps while white-collar workers run down them. Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and from the usual sports-centric sources underline a staggering if wholly unsurprising inequity. Nurses’ salaries average about $71,000 a year. New York Yankees ace-inwaiting Gerrit Cole makes almost $99,000.
A day.
Every day.
That’s what $36 million a year looks like.
That’s not his fault; I mean, God bless him. The fault is with us. Only our persistent attention to the game enables salaries such as that in a sport where the average player makes $4.3 million, and the same with the NHL ($4 million), the NFL ($2.7 million), and the NBA ($7.7 million). The league minimums range from $510,000 to $893,000.
It’s not exactly a scoop that America’s players are safely among the 1 percent, but the figures somehow look more grotesque in the moments when we find out who is really, truly, demonstrably essential.
But the times, some 56 years after Bob Dylan’s suggestion, they are a-changin’. Maybe.
In a poll released this past week by Reuters and Ipsos, the global market research firm, sports did worst among public events people feel comfortable about attending on the other side of COVID-19. Just 17% of American adults said they would attend once they are open to the public, while 26% said they would rather wait for a vaccine, even when told one might not be available for a year. Even among respondents who actually attended a sporting event in the past year, only 42% said they’re likely to do it again post-coronavirus.
Sports in empty places might be the impetus for a rebalancing of what have come into focus as our true American values during this crisis.
“What makes us who we are are our values,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the other day in one of his briefings. “I had two nightmares when this started. One, that I would put out directives on what we need to do and 19 million New Yorkers would say, ‘I haven’t been convinced, I’m not going to do this.’ Because look at what the directives were, we’re going to close down every business. You have to stay in your home. I mean, the most disruptive government policies put in place. I can’t even remember the last time. I can’t even see in the history books the last time government was more disruptive to individual life.
“Second nightmare was what if the essential workers don’t show up? You have to have food. You have to have transportation. The lights have to be on. Someone has to pick up the garbage. The hospitals have to run. What if the essential workers said, ‘I’m not showing up?’ You’ve communicated so effectively the fear of the virus that the essential workers say, ‘If everybody’s staying home, I’m staying home, too.’ It could have happened. What happens if the essential workers here said, ‘I’m not going to show up to run the bus? You don’t pay me enough to put my life in danger. I’m not doing it.’ They showed up. They showed up ... the essential workers still showed up. “That is a value. “They didn’t show up for a paycheck. They didn’t show up because government asked them to show up. They didn’t show up because their employer said, ‘I need you to show up.’ They showed up out of their values and out of their honor and out of their dignity.”
Sports will inevitably reopen in a different way and we can only hope the culture at large does the same, maybe with a different way of looking at the environment, a different analysis of what’s really important to everyone, a different way of respecting the incredible honor and dignity our essential workers displayed throughout the crisis. Maybe.
If nothing else, it’s maybe worth a quick revisit to the Dylan anthem: