A’s player tests positive, Giants cancel workouts and Bruce Jenkins questions whether a season can happen.
‘What are we doing?’ Posey’s words capture folly of sport’s fitful restart
Baseball’s attempt to coexist with COVID19 is less than a week old, and already the season is over. There can’t be a reasonably minded soul who thinks this is going to work.
The training camps might lurch awkwardly toward games that count, but getting all the way to October, and a World Series? No chance. The trust is gone, and just as important, so is the fun.
Only baseball, a sport in which a labor “agreement” isn’t actually an agreement, could pull off such a monumental disaster in so short a time. The NBA’s “bubble” experiment in Orlando, an idea that has a whole lot of people freaked out, sounds like paradise by comparison.
The MLB experiment really ended Saturday, in my view. On the Giants’ second day of workouts, Buster Posey expressed serious reservations about playing a season and uttered the catchphrase for the entire mess: “What are we doing?” The best player in the game, Mike Trout, said he wasn’t at all comfortable
about leaving a pregnant wife at home. A starquality pitcher, the Dodgers’ David Price, bailed. There was word that the Braves’ Freddie Freeman, a fourtime AllStar, didn’t just test positive but was significantly ill.
Then again, maybe it ended Sunday, when the A’s joined several other teams in their frustration over inexcusably delayed test results. Or on Monday, when A’s pitcher Jake Diekman told The Chronicle’s Susan Slusser, “I honestly feel like this is just going to get shut down in a week, or everyone is going to opt out.”
Tuesday wasn’t so great, either. As the Giants called off their workouts, unable to proceed until receiving results from tests taken over the weekend, it was learned that A’s pitcher Jesús Luzardo had tested positive. No one player is more important than another in a pandemic world, but Luzardo is one of the brightest young talents in the game. How many A’s fans are excited about anything just now? And how long can MLB ignore such alarming trends?
At the game’s highest level, executives didn’t have to worry about taking the field in a mask, or wonder whether they should touch a certain baseball, or basically have their lives turned upside down. They had one job: proper execution of coronavirus testing and producing the results with dispatch. Yes, that’s a difficult task in any sector of society, but if you’re going to make that promise, you have to be absolutely certain of your methods. Hell, this thing fell apart before some fans even realized training camps had reopened.
Even in the absence of trust, let’s make a crazy assumption and say the testing process begins to work. Just as relevant, in terms of the players’ commitment, is this simple fact: Baseball, in essence a kids’ game, no longer feels like that among the professionals. It’s not fun, it’s not promising, and it’s fraught with fears and anxiety.
I guess some people were invigorated by the sight of the Giants and A’s working out over the weekend. I found it depress
ing, knowing what the players, staff members and media had to go through just to get clearance. A’s pitcher Sean Manaea said he’d consider wearing a mask during games, should we reach that point. There was a fair measure of levity, players laughing and goofing around, and you know the majority took great pleasure in a productive swing, a smooth pickup, a pitch with life.
But it always comes back to this, in the Bay Area and in every camp around the country: What are we doing?
As The Chronicle’s Henry Schulman pointed out recently, baseball made a terrible mistake coming up with an “Injured List” that does not identify players who tested positive. Naturally, situations arise in which a player skips a workout, perhaps for perfectly normal reasons, but is now immediately under suspicion. Certain teams deliberately will hide the issues, raising doubts about the credibility of anything they announce. A manager could be well aware of a player’s positive test, yet has to dance around the issue in media interviews.
Result: Chalk up another example of how MLB came into this totally unprepared. And wait until teams start hitting the road for actual games, should they get that far. You’ve never seen a plan housing such delusional optimism.
Apparently, we are to assume that teams will venture into virusravaged Phoenix, Southern California and Texas (where the Houston region set a high for COVID19 hospitalizations Monday) and everything will work out great. In cities that seem a bit safer, players figure, what the hell, let’s go to a bar and restaurant. We’re young, we’re bulletproof, we’ll be OK. If you scoff, you’re not grasping the mood of ignorance — arrogance, selfishness, whatever you like — that has caused such widespread damage to pandemic recovery.
“It takes one guy to bring it into the clubhouse,” Trout said Saturday. “And given how contagious this virus is, it’s going to be hard to contain.”
Back in March, the great Vin Scully did an interview with the Los Angeles Times, saying he couldn’t wait for the game’s return. “Baseball is not a bad thermometer,” the retired Dodgers broadcaster said. “When baseball begins, that will be a sure sign that the country is slowly getting back on its feet.”
Those were heartwarming words. At the time, no one could have forecast Posey’s pointed observation, or two more words that characterize the reality in this country: too soon.