{"id":46877,"date":"2020-04-13T10:44:09","date_gmt":"2020-04-13T14:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=46877"},"modified":"2020-08-13T10:50:02","modified_gmt":"2020-08-13T14:50:02","slug":"a-2020-mlb-arizona-only-short-season-greed-personified","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=46877","title":{"rendered":"A 2020 MLB Arizona-only short season: greed personified"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

I know that over the last few years, baseball has definitely fallen pretty hard in terms of priorities in my life, but it\u2019s still my favorite sport, and I\u2019ll always have an ear to the ground in regards to it.\u00a0 I\u2019ll also include that the lack of the pomp and circumstance of the Opening Day that didn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Naturally, within the inner workings of baseball and their respective organizations, there are massive repercussions to not having a season; fans don\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ballparks large and small, major league, minor league, semi-pro, etc, make no money on parking, concessions and tickets when there is no baseball.\u00a0 The local economies that house and surround said ballparks also feel the pinch from there being no focal point to draw traffic to them.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

And when everything culminates, above all else, the owners, investors and other partners who run baseball organizations and the teams themselves, aren\u2019t making money when there\u2019s no baseball being played.<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s kind of messed up is that baseball players, are still getting paid in spite of the shutdown.\u00a0 For doing jack shit nothing at this point, as they can\u2019t really train, since the places they\u2019d go train at are all also shutdown.\u00a0 Sure, the Bryce Harpers and the Manny Machados aren\u2019t going to be getting their full $30M+ salaries for the year, but it\u2019s reported that quite a few players are making up to $143K a week<\/a> for doing the aforementioned nothing.<\/span><\/p>\n

But anyway, the point of this post comes from some news that\u2019s been bubbling over the last few weeks about how Major League Baseball is kicking an idea around<\/a>, that would attempt to get baseball back onto the field as soon as possible, even if it had some really extreme guidelines about it.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 But here\u2019s the real crazy part of it: all 30 teams would be playing in various stadiums all across Arizona.\u00a0 And possibly Florida.\u00a0 Or maybe just Arizona.\u00a0 The point is, MLB wants to play as much of an entire season as possible in either just Arizona, or they\u2019ll 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Whether it\u2019s one game a day, or routine double-headers, a whole lot of baseball to be played; in the middle of summer in Phoenix, Arizona.\u00a0 And\/or a variety of sites across Florida.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ultimately, this whole idea seems very hare brained, not well thought-out, and no matter how many times MLB stooges throw around \u201cproposed\u201d and \u201cit\u2019s just an idea,\u201d 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<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Naturally this has not been very well received with the players themselves, and quite a numerous number of them have anonymously voiced<\/a> 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\u2019s also putting a tremendous amount of peoples\u2019 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

For every Aaron Boone and Dave Roberts who are considered \u201cyoung\u201d managers, there\u2019s a Dusty Baker or Charlie Manuel who are like 104 years old each, who would be in the prime range of high risk.\u00a0 Just because the game is being run by 20-somethings putting up gaudy WAR numbers, doesn\u2019t mean there aren\u2019t many older guys behind the scenes that are pushing the right buttons.<\/span><\/p>\n

But most importantly, the one thing that seems to be overlooked the most in pursuit of all these dolla dolla bills y\u2019all are the fact that everyone has families<\/strong> that they are going to be taken away from for 4-5 entire months, while they\u2019re basically put in BioDome to play baseball for that time for the entertainment of millions of people that they don\u2019t know.<\/span><\/p>\n

Whether it\u2019s a young Latino whose mom lives with him from the Dominican Republic, or it\u2019s a 36-year old veteran with a wife and three kids, it\u2019s rare that there\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

These are just the two biggest reasons why this is a reckless, short-sighted and turrible idea.\u00a0 We don\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a blatant cash grab of an idea that MLB owners are kicking around because they\u2019re having heartburn over the fact that they will not be making a billion dollars this year, and that they\u2019re concerned that the several other billions sitting in their bank accounts isn\u2019t enough.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cabin fever is something that Americans are dealing with, but in the grand spectrum of things, it\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Americans can live a few months without baseball or any sort of living sporting competition.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019t deserve it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know that over the last few years, baseball has definitely fallen pretty hard in terms of priorities in my life, but it\u2019s still my favorite sport, and I\u2019ll always have an ear to the ground in regards to it.\u00a0 I\u2019ll also include that the lack of the pomp and circumstance of the Opening Day … Continue reading A 2020 MLB Arizona-only short season: greed personified<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[176,88,62,79,191,78,49],"class_list":["post-46877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-murica","tag-ballparks","tag-baseball","tag-cashmoney","tag-greed","tag-lowered-expectations","tag-wtf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46877"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46883,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46877\/revisions\/46883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}