Practice baseball begins Saturday with a bang, and you're all supposed to be thrilled.
In other news, two of the game's brightest young stars, Chicago's Yoan Moncada and Tampa's Austin Meadows, just tested positive for COVID-19 and probably won't be able to start the season. Here's where you have a choice.
1. Wonder if the business plan for this restart is just what America needs.
2. Wonder if the business plan for this restart is the worst idea in a year full of them.
Bet on 2. Bet heavily on 2.
While MLB's year hasn't come close to being Daniel Snyder's last week in terms of horrendous news — and while we're at it, I can't wait for what comes next because we all know there's going to be a next under the blood-in-the-bay-sharks-come-to-play rule — everything MLB has done this year has damaged the value of the sport it is trying to sell. Baseball wraps itself in romance at every chance it gets but has been handed over to a bunch of insurance adjusters who only are empowered to turn down your claim. Even their medical responses have been haphazard with a side of slapdash, to the point of making us all queasy about their attempts to do this.
And now Moncada and Meadows have the 'rona, after Buster Posey already said he's taking the year off, and Mike Trout only committed to giving it a go three days ago. Ten umpires opted out. Some players are wearing masks when they play, but most aren't, including most catchers and home plate umpires. Taking the NFL Players Association COVID heat map as a guide for where the virus is least controlled, 330 of the 900 games will be played in hot-spot cities, and the teams will be in approximately 400 airplanes between now and the end of September.
How many more ways do you have to use your product as bait for a virus that kills, maims and incapacitates and inconveniences in an utterly random fashion? The answer is 1,500 — players, managers, coaches, trainers, equipment managers and ancillary employees and front office personnel. The regional TV beast must be fed, and then the national TV beast must be fed.
That's what all these risky restarts have in common — the money came first, and it was the one thing that could guarantee that the outbreak would be uncontrollable. Baseball just happen to make their restart the messiest of all.
And now here we are, with a series of what soccer fans know as derbies — where teams that operate in close proximity to each other play each other for a few days before the irregular season starts this coming Thursday. The Giants play the A's Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, the first, second and third opportunities the teams have to spread the virus in bulk.
Yes, that's exactly what these games feel like, the dangerously amoral choice of 30 men to keep the engines churning while giving as little thought as possible to what has to be thrown in the machinery. When we watch players keep catching the bug, Buster Posey seems less a hero and more a pragmatist — as though there was a choice other than the unitary "Of course I'm not playing." These games are a demonstrably terrible idea under the structure in which they are being played, and every new name on the 'rona list is going to be the proof. Turning Yoan Moncada into an Adam Engel-Nomar Mazara platoon, or Austin Meadows into Manuel Margot is a lot of things but one of them is the crass-on-crass "We just chewed up two marketable stars without a thought."
And there will be more, for a sport that only now is clumsily embracing the notion that young exciting players are important to the futures of the game and their desired fan demographics. What if Trout gets it? What if Ronald Acuna gets it? What if Christian Yelich or Cody Bellinger or Aaron Judge or Bryce Harper or Marcus Semien get it? How much of this will be enough turning to too much to bear?
The answer is almost certainly "When we run out of players." The disease of next-man-up, which seemed like a benign slogan before the threat of knee injuries became the threat of permanent lung damage, is a philosophically dangerous one in these times.
But the games... we gotta have the games. Except we don't. Not under these conditions. Not when the players you most want to peddle to the bill-paying public aren't available.