If you are a Detroit Tigers diehard as I am, you can’t feel encouraged about the 2020 season, and not just because manager Ron Gardenhire is still expecting key innings from Jordan Zimmermann. As I write, the season might not happen: it certainly does not seem like the owners and players are any closer to a deal to return to play than they were when negotiations started almost two months ago.
Back in March, I had tickets to see the Tigers and Nationals play a spring training game in Lakeland on the 15th. It turned out that this would be one of the first games canceled as a result of COVID-19. To be honest, I had not thought much about baseball since that day until May 10, when Major League Baseball announced their proposal for an 80-game schedule.
As a baseball fan, I was excited. An 80-game schedule meant that not only would baseball return, but that the Tigers mathematically could not lose 100 games this year. Play ball!, right?
Well, not exactly. The next day ace relief pitcher of the World Champion Washington Nationals Sean Doolittle unleashed a Tweetstorm that began humbly enough: “Bear with me, but it feels like we’ve zoomed past the most important aspect of any MLB restart plan: health protections for players, families, staff, stadium workers and the workforce it would require to resume a season.” Several tweets and now weeks later, it is clear that many of these practical questions of how to return have not been answered, even as baseball has been at pains to answer the question of when to return.
Major League Baseball’s tone-deafness on the humanitarian aspects that Doolittle raises aside, I think the most basic practical question is: “What if a player or a team gets sick?” Interdependence is built into Major League Baseball. As much as I may have wanted to excise the Detroit Tigers from the 2019 season,[1] one could not simply do that because their being on the field was essential to other teams that actually mattered. Someone had to be representing the other side when the Minnesota Twins clinched the AL Central title on Sept. 25, and it might as well have been Drew Verhagen. If one player or one clubhouse gets infected, that’s a massive logistical challenge for the entire league, whether it’s the New York Yankees or the Florida Marlins.
“So far we’ve flattened the curve to a little over 1,000 deaths per day in the US. Is that acceptable? That is a 9/11 every three days. Think of 1,000 deaths per day over the course of months.“
The “zooming” Doolittle decried has continued. Right now the owners and players are embroiled in a dispute about how much to pay the players. One might suggest simply prorating the players’ salaries for an 80-game season; this is basically the players’ position. However, the situation is more complicated than that because owners are looking at large cuts in revenue due to the games being played in front of empty stadiums. On Tuesday, the owners introduced their plan, which would save money by paying players a percentage of their salary on a graduated basis, similar in format to America’s tax system, and perhaps equally Byzantine. Washington Nationals’ pitcher Max Scherzer, a leader of the union greeted the plan by saying “there’s no reason to engage with MLB in any further compensation reductions,” or in three letters: D.O.A.
It’s easy to take the owners’ side, and I expect most people will. The genius of the graduated plan is that the biggest losers will be multimillionaires like Justin Verlander and Miguel Cabrera who already have more money than any of us reading Watershed Voice could ever imagine. They hardly make for Dickensian heroes of public sympathy. But think for a moment of what they are being asked to do: spend months at a time in close proximity with other human beings during a time of pandemic. Don’t get me started on baseball players’ hygiene (spitballs, anyone?). This was not in their job description when they signed on the dotted line, let alone massive pay-cuts.
Baseball has always been a microcosm of many of America’s struggles, including this struggle between labor and management. But the bigger picture here is that they are also embodying our struggle over this debate of when to reopen and how.
As a pastor, I have wrestled with this question for months. What I have tried to make clear to the people I serve is that we have to address the how question of making it safe for people to return to in-person worship before we can address the when. A key part of that is whether the health situations meets the CDC’s own guidelines. As I write this, only Illinois, California, and New York appear to be particularly close to hitting those benchmarks, according to Pro Publica. In Major League Baseball’s case, not only are many of the areas currently unsafe, but there’s little evidence that they’ve done the actual work of ensuring players’ and all team personnel’s safety. Putting together a schedule or deciding whether or not to use a DH in both leagues is the fun part, but it’s also the easy part.
In communities all across America, businesses are starting to open. Why? I will grant economic necessity for many small businesses, although far less so for the multibillionaire owners of Major League Baseball teams. But another big reason seems to be that our internal clocks are telling us it’s time to start returning to normal. That’s easy to empathize with, but the problem is, in so many places, including here in St. Joseph County, not a lot has changed. So far we’ve flattened the curve to a little over 1,000 deaths per day in the US. Is that acceptable? That is a 9/11 every three days. Think of 1,000 deaths per day over the course of months.
If the standard of human life is this low for reopening something as nonessential as sports, then I have to ask what were two months of sacrifice by everyday Americans for? I might as well have gone to my spring training game on March 15.
As a fan, as a Little League alum., as a “stat nerd,” baseball has provided me more joy over the years than I can put into words. But for MLB to play ball right now would be greedy, foolhardy, and dangerous; and worst of all, it would be our national pastime sending a terrible message to the rest of the country precisely at the time when we need moral leadership the most. So in the words of a century of Cubs’ fans, I’ll “wait ‘til next year.”
James E. Smith is a pastor serving at Trinity Episcopal and St. John’s Lutheran Churches. For comments, questions, or rebuttals, fire off an e-mail at [email protected]. Prosit!
[1] Perhaps exorcise is the word I actually want here.
Any views or opinions expressed in “Gutenberg” are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Watershed Voice staff or its board of directors.
