Get used to weird aura of sports in COVID era
As Major League Baseball began on Thursday night, with actual games that count in actual standings for a little stump of a regular season, Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Mookie Betts took a knee during the national anthem while teammates on either side of him placed their hands on his shoulders.
Cameras captured this scene, as one of baseball’s few African-american stars took a moment to offer solemn support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Behind him, in the stands, cardboard cut-outs of various Dodger fans grinned happily.
One fellow in a plaid shirt and glasses was positively beaming.
Cardboard cut-outs, it would seem, do not have a great sense for the moment.
Scenes like these are about to play out with regularity, as sports in the time of COVID-19 transitions in full to games that matter. In North America, baseball has followed soccer into a resumption of play; pro basketball and hockey will restart their truncated 2020 seasons next weekend. All manner of weird things will be seen in stadiums, from cardboard fans with grins that will be present even when the home team surrenders a walk-off homer, to vast empty sections that will turn the whole league into a Tampa Bay Rays game, to fake crowd noise that will cause parks bereft of fans to break into bedlam.
There will be other incongruities: Breaks for sanitizing, expanded rosters, concerns over whether the acoustics of an empty arena will mean everyone hears too much of everything, from coaching strategy to criticism from a television analyst to unfettered cursing.
In Europe, where sports have been back for about a month, some of the odd realities of playing amid a pandemic have already been on display. When Norwich dropped a match at home a couple of weeks ago that ensured they would be relegated from England’s Premier League, the faux crowd noise did not provide them with the rousing salute that local fans usually give to their plucky heroes. Rather, whoever handles such things in the TV studio must have pressed the button marked Lusty Boos. It seemed a little harsh, frankly.
Games broadcast from Germany have included the sounds of players yelling at each other in many languages, and in one match, as a team tried to protect a late lead, came a shout in clear English: “Waste time.” It’s the thing that everyone knows happens at the end of a soccer match, but usually it’s not admitted quite so clearly.
And so, expect some odd things to happen. But beyond the curious minutiae, there remains a broader question. The games will matter, but will it feel like they matter? Aside from the existential question of whether something like pro sports feels frivolous amid a pandemic, which has been well and thoroughly debated by this point, there’s the question of whether the games themselves will feel too strange to have meaning.
Come playoff time, fans and (especially) media fall into comfortable narratives to explain the performance of this or that team. There is more randomness built into the results than most of the sports-consuming public would ever like to admit — although the betting houses sure know it — but we sometimes paper over this by drawing sweeping conclusions from a series of games altered by a few close-fought moments: Losing teams don’t have enough heart or clutch players, or they are too small or not defensive enough or the goalie just doesn’t have capital-i It.
But the pandemic, and all it has wrought, introduces a whole new level of randomness into the sports equation. What teams and players will benefit from a months-long layoff in the middle of the season, and which will be hurt by it? Who will manage the strange reality of months inside a bubble, and who will be adversely affected by it? One can guess that the organizations that are generally competent will figure out how to prosper within unusual constraints, but it would only be a guess.
There are also massive health and fitness questions. Who was able to stay in shape? Which teams will manage to avoid the potential impacts that come with a positive test? Will any franchise players suddenly disappear for between seven and 10 days?
All of it means that, whatever you thought of a particular team in February, I’m not sure that opinion should be changed much by whatever happens over the next couple of months.
Maybe teams will be undone by familiar problems or maybe they will struggle with the countless new challenges raised by, you know, all this. No one will really know. So what kind of expectations should fans have of their teams? The wise move is to not get one’s hopes up. Don’t start thinking about a championship. Hope your favourite team stays healthy, and leave it at that.