A’s, Giants ready to play ball amid patchwork of trust issues
Baseball is back! Maybe! Get ready for: odes to the national pastime, paeans on how baseball can bind us together, will be a welcome distraction, is a symbol of unity and hope, an illustration of normalcy.
Also get ready for: another possible shutdown.
Baseball may certainly be a symbol. However, it may be less an emblem of hope and more an illustration of how money comes before health, of how a push to get back to “normal” has been dictated by finances and not science.
The A’s and the Giants will begin “Spring Training 2.0” at their respective ballparks in the coming week. In theory, a 60game baseball season will begin in about three weeks, on July 23 or 24.
But if we have learned anything in 2020, it’s that everything can change in the course
of one week, let alone three.
Coronavirus numbers are spiking around the country. The current hot spots involve a third of Major League Baseball markets: California (five teams), Arizona (one team), Texas (two teams) and Florida (two teams). Instead of being under control, the number of cases is growing, particularly among young people.
The American sports world effectively shut down in midMarch when one professional athlete tested positive. Now the sports world is planning to reopen with dozens of players across all sports disciplines testing positive.
Baseball already has had about 50 coronavirus cases among players and staff. The Phillies had 12 confirmed cases and other teams, including the Red Sox, Tigers, Mariners, Dodgers, Twins and Yankees, have reported positive tests within their organizations. The Giants have reported no cases. An A’s minorleague coach spent two months in an ICU with the coronavirus, but when asked by The Chronicle if there were other positive cases, general manager David Forst did not answer, citing privacy issues.
Major League Baseball released a 113page “2020 Operations Manual” that details all sorts of protocols about cleanliness and social distancing: disinfecting baseballs, no spitting, no hugs.
But by far the most interesting protocol is the section where there is none.
In the section labeled “Conduct outside of Club Facilities” — or as we like to call it, “life” — there are no instructions for players. Just some vague recommendations to be careful, to avoid being around large groups or in close proximity to others. MLB states that it won’t formally regulate players and other team members when they are away from the facilities but expects everyone to act responsibly.
In other words, it’s the honor system, folks.
Other leagues, such as the NBA and Major League Soccer, are attempting to open in some kind of isolation bubble, and there is skepticism that even that will work because staff will be coming and going.
For baseball, teams will be opening in their own ballparks. Players will be living at home. Routines will easily be resumed. As we’ve seen around the country, humans don’t seem to have a lot of patience for making sacrifices or changing their routines.
Baseball teams can have as many as 60 players at spring training and active rosters, when the season starts, as large as 30. Plus coaches and other staff. That means dozens of people in each market, many of them young men in their 20s, are expected to do the right thing, socially distance, wash hands, don’t go out in groups.
Will this be difficult? Undoubtedly. The National Women’s Soccer League began its season Saturday with a tournament format in Salt Lake City. Just days before the event was to begin, one team, the Orlando Pride, had to withdraw because of the high number of positive coronavirus tests. The Orlando Sentinel reported the testing was done because groups of players had gone to a bar.
John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley, said that at least professional athletes are motivated by a paycheck.
“They are incentivized to behave,” Swartzberg said. “I’m more worried about college players.
“But, overall, I’m quite skeptical that any of these players are going to do what is necessary to protect themselves.”
MLB’s Operations Manual also directs teams to individually craft specific rules on acceptable conduct when they are on the road and states that the league will not be involved in creating or enforcing any specific codes of conduct.
So, in that way baseball actually will be a national symbol: for a disjointed, piecemeal policy that may prove as ineffective at controlling outbreaks of the virus as our federal approach has been. Teams are left to craft individual policies. Employees are expected to handle things themselves. Every market will be different.
Some teams may get to have fans in attendance while other teams — hello California! — will not have any fans, creating a distinctly unlevel playing environment and experience.
For example, Astros owner Jim Crane announced that he needed revenue and the only way he can counter his losses is “get some people in the building and sell some tickets, some merchandise, some cold beer, whatever they’d like to have.”
Woohoo! Let the good times roll for the team embroiled in a cheating scandal.
Yet cases are spiking so severely in Texas, including the Houston area, that the governor has paused reopening. There is a belief that a ban on large gatherings may have to go back into effect. So why can’t MLB just institute that ban so that everything is even? Because the owners want to make money.
The concept of a teambyteam protocol for traveling on the road, and an individualbyindividual protocol for safe behavior every day is interesting in a sport whose very foundation has been rocked by virulent, unchecked mistrust on both sides.
To get through this pandemic in any part of society, to have a chance against this invisible contagion, the challenges have to be confronted with the spirit of unity, cooperation and trust.
Yet after months of baseball owners and players bashing each other, we now expect that players will fall in line with team protocols and teams will trust players to do the right thing?
In a world where trust is absolutely needed, that’s the one thing we know for certain that baseball lacks.
So, play ball! (Maybe.)