I know that over the last few years, baseball has definitely fallen pretty hard in terms of priorities in my life, but it’s still my favorite sport, and I’ll always have an ear to the ground in regards to it. I’ll also include that the lack of the pomp and circumstance of the Opening Day that didn’t happen is mostly lost on me, because of the whole, having a baby owning my life from here on until the indefinite future, but it’s still a sad state of affairs that this is the time of the year in which baseball should be shining the brightest, but thanks to coronavirus, is nowhere to be seen.
Naturally, within the inner workings of baseball and their respective organizations, there are massive repercussions to not having a season; fans don’t get to enjoy watching the national pastime, ballparks all across the country sit dormant as the beautiful spring days and nights come and go, and of course, there are billions of dollars being lost all across the board from there being no baseball.
Ballparks large and small, major league, minor league, semi-pro, etc, make no money on parking, concessions and tickets when there is no baseball. The local economies that house and surround said ballparks also feel the pinch from there being no focal point to draw traffic to them. People who work in the ballparks and any businesses that rely on baseball to bring in money, end up suffering and worse, jobless as a result.
And when everything culminates, above all else, the owners, investors and other partners who run baseball organizations and the teams themselves, aren’t making money when there’s no baseball being played.
What’s kind of messed up is that baseball players, are still getting paid in spite of the shutdown. For doing jack shit nothing at this point, as they can’t really train, since the places they’d go train at are all also shutdown. Sure, the Bryce Harpers and the Manny Machados aren’t going to be getting their full $30M+ salaries for the year, but it’s reported that quite a few players are making up to $143K a week for doing the aforementioned nothing.
But anyway, the point of this post comes from some news that’s been bubbling over the last few weeks about how Major League Baseball is kicking an idea around, that would attempt to get baseball back onto the field as soon as possible, even if it had some really extreme guidelines about it.
Basically, in this proposal, the entire 2020 MLB season would take place over the span of 4-5 months starting in July or August and go through presumably November. But here’s the real crazy part of it: all 30 teams would be playing in various stadiums all across Arizona. And possibly Florida. Or maybe just Arizona. The point is, MLB wants to play as much of an entire season as possible in either just Arizona, or they’ll do Arizona and Florida and use the Spring Training Cactus and Grapefruit leagues as two divisions and then mash together a World Series at presumably a neutral site.
In order to accomplish this, MLB is proposing that ALL personnel, from players, managers, coaches, medical, translators, you name it; basically live out of hotels for the entire season, so that personnel can be quarantined and monitored, and they really really promise to do their best job to routinely medically check everyone to make sure nobody gets coronavirus.
Everyone would be playing out of the numerous empty stadiums that exist all over the metropolitan Phoenix area, most of them being spring training facilities for half of MLB to begin with. Whether it’s one game a day, or routine double-headers, a whole lot of baseball to be played; in the middle of summer in Phoenix, Arizona. And/or a variety of sites across Florida.
Ultimately, this whole idea seems very hare brained, not well thought-out, and no matter how many times MLB stooges throw around “proposed” and “it’s just an idea,” the underlying message behind everything is that they want to get baseball back on the field as soon as humanly possible, so that they can get back to making money.
Naturally this has not been very well received with the players themselves, and quite a numerous number of them have anonymously voiced their skepticism and abject rejection of the idea, because regardless of the fact that it would get everyone across the board back to earning billions of dollars, it’s also putting a tremendous amount of peoples’ health at risk; most notably all the still-active baseball-lifers who work as managers, and coaches or other personnel on teams who all fall into the age range of the most-susceptible to catching, and succumbing to coronavirus.
For every Aaron Boone and Dave Roberts who are considered “young” managers, there’s a Dusty Baker or Charlie Manuel who are like 104 years old each, who would be in the prime range of high risk. Just because the game is being run by 20-somethings putting up gaudy WAR numbers, doesn’t mean there aren’t many older guys behind the scenes that are pushing the right buttons.
But most importantly, the one thing that seems to be overlooked the most in pursuit of all these dolla dolla bills y’all are the fact that everyone has families that they are going to be taken away from for 4-5 entire months, while they’re basically put in BioDome to play baseball for that time for the entertainment of millions of people that they don’t know.
Whether it’s a young Latino whose mom lives with him from the Dominican Republic, or it’s a 36-year old veteran with a wife and three kids, it’s rare that there’s an Evan Gattis-like hermit who has nobody in their lives, and will not be okay with the fact that they are living out of a hotel for months on end in order to play baseball.
These are just the two biggest reasons why this is a reckless, short-sighted and turrible idea. We don’t even have to get into stuff like logistics, division realignment, interleague, playoffs, or any of the other hundred moving parts that make up a baseball season to understand that a hackneyed Arizona-only season is a stupid idea, and provides horrible optics of the greed of baseball owners.
It’s a blatant cash grab of an idea that MLB owners are kicking around because they’re having heartburn over the fact that they will not be making a billion dollars this year, and that they’re concerned that the several other billions sitting in their bank accounts isn’t enough.
Cabin fever is something that Americans are dealing with, but in the grand spectrum of things, it’s about as epitomal of a first-world problem there is, despite the fact that the United Fucking States is operating under coronavirus like a third-world country while the neanderthals in Wuhan where all this shit started have basically already overcome it. Americans can live a few months without baseball or any sort of living sporting competition. Or let some other country provide the baseball for us; last I heard, both Taiwan and South Korea are on the cusp of starting their baseball leagues, and ESPN has already reached out to both, in order to work out some broadcasting rights.
For a league that so often touts its own self-importance and integrity, Major League Baseball is embarrassing themselves with even proposing such a flagrantly obvious cash grab of an idea that jeopardizes the lives of hundreds of baseball personnel, all for the sake of trying to cash in and be some kind of entertainment hero to a nation that frankly doesn’t deserve it.
