ExOakland manager is recovering from virus
He’s rooting for baseball to forge safe reopening
As baseball wrangles with trying to get an abbreviated season up and running in the midst of a pandemic, one former bigleague manager has a unique perspective on the efforts: Art Howe had COVID19 less than two months ago and spent five days in a Houston ICU.
And Howe, even after his experiences, hopes the sport can figure out how to get under way.
“I would hope Major League Baseball would keep everything as clean as possible and use distancing as much as possible, but this country needs baseball. They really do, it’s the best sport going. I don’t care what they say about football,” Howe said earlier this week on The Chronicle’s “A’s Plus” podcast before MLB and the players union came to an agreement to resume playing. “For me, baseball is No. 1 and I miss it. At the same time, I don’t want anyone to get this.”
Howe points to the Korean baseball league (the KBO) as a possible example for MLB to follow,
but he said the league must be extremely careful. He knows COVID19 is no joke. He wound up with pneumonia, and he still cannot taste anything.
“I can’t even describe what it’s like not to have taste buds,” he said. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, because everything just tastes like goo.”
Howe, 73, lost 16 pounds during his ordeal, which started with extreme chills in early May. Two days later, Howe went to get tested for the coronavirus, and he tested positive. His wife, Betty, and his daughters tested negative. Howe had to isolate himself in a bedroom while Betty left food at his door, but he wasn’t eating much, anyway, and his energy levels plummeted.
“I just went downhill,” Howe said. “I’d take a shower and I’d have trouble stepping over the tub, I was so weak. It really saps your strength.”
With her husband’s condition worsening by the day, Betty Howe requested an ambulance a week and a half into his illness, and at the hospital, his pneumonia was diagnosed. He didn’t need oxygen, though his saturation level dipped down to 89, and he was not on a ventilator, but he was prescribed a 10day course of hydroxychloroquine.
“I don’t know if that’s what turned me around,” Howe said of the drug, the use of which the FDA cautioned against on June 15, “but I started to slowly but surely feel a little bit better.”
Taste buds aside, Howe feels back at full strength now, and he has added six or seven pounds. He’s troubled to see people in the Houston area be somewhat blasé about the pandemic, however. He wears a mask anytime he is in public, but went to the grocery store Monday and said more than 70% of the customers did not have on masks.
“That really concerns me, because they don’t know what they’re dealing with,” he said. “Everything is open here, basically. The restaurants, they’re at 25% of capacity and trying to spread people out, but it’s amazing how many people are walking around without masks.”
Howe’s best work as a manager came in Oakland, where he took a team with low expectations and molded it into a winner over the course of several years; the team increased its win total in each of his final five seasons in Oakland and made the playoffs from 2000 through 2002 before he left for the New York Mets.
The 2002 team, of course, is best known for its thenALrecord 20game winning streak, later featured in the book and movie “Moneyball.” Fun times for the team, but pressurepacked for the man at the helm as the wins piled up and interest increased around the country. Then Oakland nearly coughed up win No. 20 before Scott Hatteberg’s pinchhit homer in the bottom of the ninth.
“It would have probably been easier if I’d been playing,” Howe said with a laugh. “As a manager, you’re putting the guys on the field, but that’s really all you can do . ... It’s stressful to see your ace (Tim Hudson) on the mound with an 11run lead and you think you’ve finally got a laugher and it was anything but.
“I was so happy for our fans, they supported us so much. When I first got there, we were losing 100 games a year but they stayed with us day in and day out, and then they finally had something to really cheer about. It was awesome. I just wish we could have gone to the World Series and won it all for them.”