Coronaball had a great opening, before reality and Covid set in
Updated Friday, July 31, 2020
There are zero fans in the stands, but they’re watching baseball on television in record numbers. ESPN reports ratings tripling from 2019’s opening week. Coronaball is better than most of us expected.
It’s fun to hear the sounds of baseball much more clearly than usual: fastball smacking into the catcher’s mitt or blasting off the wooden bat and quickly followed by an audible expletive from a chagrined pitcher.
The mascots are still active – Mr. and Mrs. Met strolling through the empty stands, doing their cheerleading best for the benefit of, well, hardly anybody.
The essence of the game remains, even with social distancing. Derek Shelton leaves the Pittsburgh Pirates’ dugout with a gaiter over his face as he stalks plate umpire Jordan Baker, who pulls a mask out of his pocket, holds it to his face, and lets the rookie manager say his piece from six feet away.
Not so much social distancing, however, when benches clear in Houston after Dodgers reliever Joe Kelly seeks vigilante justice for the Astros’ cheating scandal. Kelly earns an 8-game suspension for head-hunting. The incident might have been prompted by muttering in the Astros’ dugout that in the crowdless atmosphere is overheard by opponents.
There’s obviously not enough social distancing with the Miami Marlins, who in the first week of the pandemically shortened season manage to get 17 of their players sidelined with positive tests.
So pandemic turns to pandemonium. Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “There’s real fear, real anxiety for me, for all my teammates. We’ve found it very difficult to focus on baseball at all over the last couple of days.”
Asked if he’s considering opting out of further play, Braun says, “That thought crosses my mind; I think everybody else’s mind as well.”
The Nationals’ players vote against making an upcoming trip to Miami. No doubt they’re thinking specifically of their well-liked manager, Dave Martinez, who had heart surgery last year – the sort of “underlying condition” that makes him especially vulnerable to Covid.
Addressing the media, Martinez says, “My level of concern went from about an ‘8’ to a ’12.’ It hits home when you see half a team get infected. I have friends on that Miami team. I’m not gonna sugarcoat it, this really stinks. I’ll be honest with you. I’m scared, I really am.”
The national media searches for answers and demands more Covid defense from the commissioner’s office. Mike Wilbon of ESPN: “Major League Baseball has to be more vigilant about coronavirus than they’ve been so far. They have to trace and figure out what the hell happened with the Marlins.”
So Bob Nightengale, a very reliable reporter, apparently solves the mystery. On 93.7 The Fan in Pittsburgh he reveals that after an exhibition game in Atlanta some Marlins – “at least one for sure — got careless,” left the hotel for a night on the town.
The Marlins then traveled to Philadelphia for the opening series of the season. One of the Phillies’ coaches contracted the virus, along with a clubhouse worker. Hoping to control the outbreak, MLB canceled the Phillies’ weekend series with Toronto and shelved the Marlins until next week.
The only encouraging news is that the Phillies have no infections among their players, which points to the one advantage baseball has over other team sports: social distancing is the norm, physical contact rare.
As of Friday morning, the Marlins are the only big-league team with positive Covid tests for players since the season began. So we can hope they’re an anomaly. And that lessons will be learned from that one catastrophic night in Hotlanta.
This could have been a year of retribution for the Marlins. They have a long-term lease on the cellar of the NL East, but they have strong young arms and a pitching coach, Mel Stottlemyre Jr., drawing raves. They won two of three games in Philly, and a few New York ballwriters were suggesting they could finish ahead of not only the Phillies but also the Mets, whose pitching staff is Jacob deGrom.
But it’s a 60-game season, and the Marlins are losing more than half their players for at least a quarter of it. No team is talented enough to withstand that sort of attrition. Let’s hope they’re the only one.
