Better to close sports down than to play for phony cheers
The media and their cell phones were gathered around the managers. The players were warming up on the field. The home team employees, delighted and eager to resume some semblance of work after such a long coronavirus shutdown, were serving the fans.
No, not by welcoming them as they filed in, but rather filing their heads down to fit onto their cardboard or plastic bodies.
Baseball ... it’s back.
Or at least it was in Taiwan earlier this week.
The five-team Chinese Professional Baseball League commenced its season, fully confident of everyone’s safety because the coronavirus curve has been clearly tumbling ... and not just because the government mathematicians are telling them that it is.
Of course, precautions still had to be taken. So the government’s YouTube releases showed workers putting cardboard fans in the stands, mannequins strategically placed along the field and in other key locales.
Real fans? Not allowed to congregate, of course.
Due to the revised allowable maximums of 500 people in this Chinese megalopolis, the games were allowed to proceed, and they’re even going to be broadcast.
Well, sort of: Word is that five Rakuten Monkeys games are being streamed this week live and in living cybercolor.
Cool.
So will the U.S. of Eh? follow suit?
Word came down late Thursday from the latest Donald Trump Press Carnival that sports will indeed resume in 2020. No bigger a force than diminutive doc Anthony Fauci said that. Of course, it will only be in select parts of this stricken nation and certainly will be without fans in the stands. But hey, at least we, the closeted, entertainment-starved public, will tune in.
Or at least that’s the economic theory.
“Many of them are going to be starting without the fans,” Mr. President said. “It will be made for television ... the good, old days.”
Golly.
Good old Football, of course, will not hear of it. Not yet, anyway. Roger Goodell is too good for that. Or at least that’s what his highly paid promoters and advisors and analytical savants tell him.
Goodell’s NFL isn’t worried about the start of the season or even training camp and the changes that would be in store. After all, they have a train wreck of a draft to conduct first.
Shortly after, Trump said Thursday and might have told Goodell and his commissioner counterparts recently, there will be “packed arenas,” because, “when the virus is gone, we’re going to be back to normal.”
Amen. Then again, what exactly does “normal” mean?
Doc Fauci has offered his opinions on that, just not so much in the presence of his president.
Anyway, as for resumption of sports, the mighty institution of baseball will go for it. It’s a natural. A slate of games in parks of varying size, all within 50 miles of Phoenix. And hey, if it’s 110 in the shade at many of those parks as game night approaches, so what?
There’s no fans, anyway. And the players are getting paid plenty to swelter in the early innings before the sun sets in the West.
And the NHL and NBA? Now given the green light of sorts, both may resume, but with hare-brained playoff “tournaments” in some such respective place as Las Vegas or maybe Moose Jaw, whatever the scientists and the bookies allow.
“It will definitely feel a little different,” Flyers (still) rookie Joel Farabee said Thursday, “but at the end of the day we just want to play hockey. If we can play with no fans, we will do it. I think the biggest thing is just waiting until government officials say it’s safe for us to go back out and do what we love.”
As for the fans, they can be damned, but only (fingers crossed) until next season, or after the great vaccine holiday to come. So that once the scientists get their jobs done, the “new normal” will finally be revealed for what it really is ... as phony as the baseball fans in Taiwan this week.
Goodell and the other wooden leaders of the various sports leagues should ignore the jabber from the phony politicians mentally distancing themselves from reality in Washington.
They want all sports businesses to be back and functioning fully for fiscal and electoral reasons. They don’t want to foresee the obvious problems with giving green lights to something like baseball, which has teams in major league cities across North America, along with doomed businesses in many a minor league market.
Yet as the virus hits peaks and valleys over the coming months in various locales, anything other than a very abbreviated schedule in Arizona would essentially be unworkable. After all, what if the predicted “second wave” of virus hits all those NFL markets in late September? What if a coronavirus hotspot suddenly crops up in a place like ... oh, I don’t know, the Greater Phoenix area ... sometime in August?
Chaos.
So, don’t open it up just yet. Consider instead to close it all down until 2021. Yes, business is going to suffer. Yes, athletes will have to be told that their contracts may have to be arbitrated due to loss of revenue. And good luck with that.
The inherent problems will be many and will be enormous.
But at least the approach is safer than a risky resumption of business as usual in front of cardboard and plastic “fans.”