Posey’s opt out makes perfect sense
SAN FRANCISCO — It’s easy to say that Buster Posey has the best reason — actually let’s make that plural, — to opt out of the baseball season. He and his wife, Kristen, adopted twin baby girls who arrived about six weeks prematurely last week.
Posey has always been levelheaded about the world and sports’ place in it. He announced he would miss the 2020 season in whatever form it takes. For him, it was an easy decision.
“In the current state we are in now, and these babies being as fragile as they are for the next four months at a minimum, this just ultimately was not a difficult decision for me,” Posey said on a video conference call Friday morning. “From baseball, it was a tough decision. From a family standpoint, that I feel I’m making a decision to protect our children, I think it was relatively easy.”
But that’s what we should realize. All of the roughly 2,500 or so individuals being asked to participate in a bogus, truncated baseball season have their own personal decisions to make.
Because everyone has someone in their lives they are worried about. These are humans, just like you and me. Maybe their situations are not as dramatic as the twin babies you have been yearning to adopt for years suddenly arriving.
But maybe it is a child with asthma, a mother with multiple sclerosis, a brother who is recovering from cancer treatment, a grandparent who is in the highest risk category. Every trip to the ballpark, masked and sanitized, is another game of roulette. And when games start, and teams are traveling? It’s a high-risk endeavor that baseball players are being asked to participate in, but the collateral damage could be to the people they love the most.
Posey, 33, opted to skip it. And if Posey, one of the most decorated players in the game, can make it, he may pave the way for others to make the same decision, if they can afford it. Posey can, but he is also missing out on about $8 million, which would have been his prorated salary. Teams are not required to pay players who choose to opt out, unless they personally have a high-risk condition.
Fans eager for a return to sports, at any cost, must keep in mind that they never know what an individual is going through. Posey is a private person and would like to keep much of the information about his new daughters, Ada and Libbi, out of the public eye. Like where they were born and if their early arrival was unexpected or planned. Twins are considered full-term at 37 or 38 weeks. At 32 weeks, the girls will likely have to spend at least a month in the neonatal intensive care unit, and, as Posey said, will be fragile their first several months of life.
He and Kristen and their almost 9-year-old twins Lee and Addison are overjoyed. Posey said the older kids were throwing confetti around the house.
He revealed that he and Kristen have been trying to adopt for a few years. He called the process a “roller coaster” and had been close to adoptions that didn’t work out. They even had brought a baby home, only to have the parents change their mind. That’s the kind of personal heartbreak we don’t process when we talk about things like a batter’s slump, his lack of production, the wear and tear on his body. We don’t know what each individual goes home to after a game.
Now every player is dealing with an added layer of personal stress. An unknown in the form of a mysterious disease that seems impossible to control. As Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi said, “There’s a mental health aspect to all this.”
In the early days of this restart, there have been 83 positive tests and 28 of 30 teams have had a positive test. Many, many players aside from Posey must be weighing their options.
“A hundred percent, it’s an individual decision,” Posey said. “I’ve spoken with different guys across the league. To be honest, and full disclosure, if these babies hadn’t been born right now and weren’t premature, I’d probably be playing.
“It’s very much an individual decision. We’re all trying to decipher information that is changing rapidly. As baseball players, we’re so used to a schedule coming out and being locked in. This has not been the case.”
Nor is it the case that anyone knows what is happening with this disease, which is why it seems slightly crazy that so many are being asked to be cavalier about something that could cause long-term health consequences.
Posey, whose wife once told me would lug an anatomy book around with him in the minors because he was so interested in medicine, has done his research. He and Kristen have been active in raising funds and awareness for pediatric cancer, and he is a methodical processor of information. He’s talked to doctors and tried to learn as much as he could. But there’s both too much to learn and too little known about coronavirus.
“There are no solid answers, if the babies contract the virus,” Posey said. “Will it affect them immediately? In the long term? There’s no data right now. It’s so new we don’t have those answers.”
So, each individual has to come to his or her own conclusion. What is the risk?
For Posey, the decision was easy.