Welp, after months of billionaires feuding with millionaires over millions of dollars to play a kids game, while millions of Americans are applying for unemployment in the midst of a fucking pandemic, Major League Baseball has gotten their shit together, and it looks like we’re going to have a 2020 season after all.
Honestly, I really was hoping that the entire season was going to be cancelled. The aforementioned narrative is no stretch from reality, and it was disgusting to the core to see so many rich assholes balking over as much money was being argued over, while the entire country has been brought to their knees by coronavirus, and millions of Americans are in financial ruin. The lack of a season and the financial hit that the owners and the players would all have taken would have been an appropriate slap in the collective dicks for all these greedy fucks for their money-grubbing ways and a reality check that there are things in the world way more important than fucking baseball and I love baseball.
Plus, the sheer decimation and mistreatment of minor league baseball is saddening and can be filed in part of the millions of Americans who are out of jobs and will be in the unemployment lines, and brings the Major Leagues a questionable step towards an uncertain future, but more likely they have a lucrative alternative to the minor leagues already in mind.
Regardless, so it looks like we’re going to have a season, as begrudging it may seem to me. In the other hand, the last time the Braves won the World Series, it was also in a shortened season, when the 1995 season was reduced to 144 games down from 162, so here’s hoping that the Braves can capitalize on another shortened year, and maybe fulfill the joking theory I have that babies bring luck for baseball fans.*
*A friend who is a Cubs fan had a kid in 2016, another friend who is a Nationals fan had twins in 2019 and look what happened
I mean with only 60 games to be played, 2020 truly stands to be a genuine shit show of a season where literally anyone can win right now. Teams will fall out of contention within three weeks, but those in contention can remain such all the way to the end. Sports have proven that any team can get hot on a moment’s notice, and/or have a torrid stretch, and with so little baseball to actually be had, all it takes is one well-timed hot streak, and any team can ride it to the World Series.
Prior to reading any of the coronavirus policies, as I wondered if MLB were going to operate like the Korean KBO league’s immediate shutdown if anyone tests positive, I made a joke about how positive tests will ultimately reduce the MLB season down to like 19 games, and a hot-streak Seattle Mariners end up in the World Series against a hot-starting Pittsburgh Pirates.
But that’s just it for this whole pathetic timeline of bringing MLB back for 2020, while the millionaire players were squabbling with the billionaire owners over pro-rated pay, few were actually talking about the actual fucking coronavirus that wasn’t showing any indication of not rampaging throughout America the whole time.
Sure, we’re going to have a 60-game season now, but what’s going to happen when like Anthony Rizzo contracts corona in Florida and unknowingly spreads it to his teammates, and then they unknowingly spread it to other personnel? According to the rules, players are only going to be tested every other day, so what happens if they contract it on the day in between?
As I’m writing this, there’s already been a laundry list of players and personnel, all naturally remaining anonymous, who have tested positive for coronavirus, and yet the league is fine moving forward despite knowing that there are people in their employ who are going to be carriers or at least asymptomatic.
Forget wins, losses and baseball statistics, imagine a scenario where a guy like Eric Sogard, who isn’t a massive earner and has like ten kids, catches coronavirus from one of his kids because kids will be kids and they spread germs like a petri dish. He shows up to the park, and it’s his day to not be tested, because he was tested the day before, and he spends an entire day in the locker room, around teammates, unknowingly exposing them to coronavirus. Suddenly, the entire Milwaukee Brewers team has been exposed, and there’s a day where they’re playing the Cincinnati Reds, and everyone who gets onto first base is exposing Joey Votto to coronavirus, who then cycles the same shit through the Reds’ clubhouse.
Are these two teams then suddenly forced to forfeit all their games when the entire team has coronavirus? Or are they going to scrub their entire 26-man rosters and shuttle in the taxi squad of scrubs and replacement-level players to then represent the team for two weeks and likely 14 out of their critically small number of games?
As I said, this year stands to be a massive shit show, and frankly probably shouldn’t have happened, in light of a pandemic. But a whole bunch of rich assholes are content jeopardizing the lives of themselves and others, so that they can make some fucking money, that millions of unemployed Americans won’t get a crack at sniffing.
As ironically entertaining it would be to me for the Braves to win a World Series this year, I really want to see the Mariners vs. Pirates in the Fall Classic. Nothing would be more satisfying than for MLB to have to crown a legitimate fluke of a champion, because of a hackneyed season they slapped together just so a bunch of assholes could make some money.
