With everything going on at home and abroad, you would hope that something as picayune as baseball can offer a moment of distraction and relief. That is the point, right? The national pastime? Turn on a game and disconnect your brain for three hours. Hell, that’s why the Major League Baseball was in such a rush to start the season even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic (well, that and the money, of course). Baseball is “normal,” and normality has been desperately low.
I suspect that even those who hate sports may find a wrinkle of solace in the return of something we all take for granted until it was gone. The snap of the bat, the voice of the announcer play by play advancing eighths while the ball is lost from view in a majestic arc … are the things and the sound of summer.
Now there is no swelling noise in the crowd, and the home runs echo inelegantly on the empty seats instead of falling into a swarm of raised hands, but that’s enough. If we have learned anything in this passage, it is what we have learned to live without it, individually and collectively. Getting a slice of that part is a blessing, and if you listen to the games on the radio, you will hardly know that the stadium was empty.
So of course Donald Trump also had to ruin all of that.
This time, however, he had help. New York Yankees President Randy Levine invited Trump to pitch the first pitch in a home game on August 15. Given all the city has suffered due to Trump’s galactic failed pandemic response, take a moment with the fact that the invitation was offered in the first place.
Before becoming president of the most famous franchise in baseball history, Levine served as Commissioner of Labor Relations under then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and was one of Giuliani’s closest aides. In 2008, according to OpenSecretsLevine was a campaign fundraising “package” for presidential candidate John McCain. From Rudy to McCain / Palin to George Steinbrenner’s old barn … yeah, it’s pretty safe to say we know what kind of cat it is.
At one point, Levine acquired the Trump brand standard tin ear, one so huge he believed that rolling the red carpet for a president whose failed COVID response helped send more than 23,000 New York City residents to early graves it was a good idea.
Trump, to no one’s surprise, happily accepted the invitation. Why not? The first release is cool president stuff, and it gets to be on TV, which basically seems to be what gets him out of bed these days. Also, the stadium would be empty (thanks to him), so there would be no chance of him being booed as he did when he dared to show his face at a Washington Nationals game last year.
However, the cooler heads apparently prevailed, and Trump pulled out of the appearance. I’d risk assuming that your campaign advisers didn’t relish the optics of an entire city simultaneously booing a guy standing on a dirt mound in the Bronx. Also, there was a very real chance that Trump would accidentally and embarrassingly throw the ball into left field. Apparently, for a rare change of pace, Trump listened to his people when they were wiser than he was.
The fact that the invitation was made is disgusting, and is on the verge of performative obscenity due to the difficulties that city has suffered. That Trump rejected him is one of the infinitely few good things he has done while in office.
However, the way Trump rejected him is perhaps the most irritating part of this sordid little baseball story. “Due to my strong focus on the China Virus, including scheduled meetings on Vaccines, our economy and much more, I will not be able to be in New York to launch the Yankees’ opening pitch on August 15,” he tweeted Sunday, using his usual xenophobic and racial harassing name for COVID-19. “We will make it later in the season!”
So much garbage accumulated in 47 words, like the Gettysburg Address delivered in Bizarro World.
There have been more than 4 million diagnosed cases of COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and almost 150,000 people are dead. The pandemic is spiraling out of control in the south and west, with schools reopening, and an already fragile economy threatens to split up again.
At the time, one would expect a president to be busy, but in this case the television president has “meetings” with Sean Hannity, and then with whoever is occupying Tucker Carlson’s racist chair. Fox News these days. That is what passes for “busy” in this White House, along with the ubiquitous golf outings that have finally killed shame.
Meanwhile, Trump’s own national security adviser Robert O’Brien has been diagnosed with COVID. The call comes from inside the house, Don. The man just doesn’t, can’t, won’t care.
Even Trump’s most devoted advisers and advisers have (finally) begun to despair that he will ever do more than stir up the calamities that escalate before him as he shoots racist trills of “China virus” at his base.
“People close to Trump, many of whom speak anonymously to share frank discussions and impressions, say the president’s inability to fully address the crisis is due to his pathological unwillingness to admit mistakes.” reports The Washington Post, “A positive feedback loop of overly optimistic evaluations and data from advisers and Fox News; and a penchant for magical thinking that kept him from fully engaging in the pandemic. “
You will never hear me talk rhapsodically about the “purity” of baseball. It is a billion dollar industry that has a long and bad habit of screwing municipalities to get stadiums at the expense of the people (Looking at you, Dodgers), and for every advance Jackie Robinson there have been a thousand blatantly racist actors like Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who as a baseball commissioner almost single-handedly kept the game for the whites, just decades after integration should have happened.
Also, I never expected the league to have a full season under the current circumstances, and it turns out my concern was strong. On Monday afternoon, it emerged that as many as a dozen Miami Marlins players and coaches tested positive for COVID, and there may be more infected. It was news that, while inappropriate, was nothing surprising.
Two upcoming games have been postponed, and the outbreak may become serious enough to jeopardize a season that only has days. Canceling the season entirely seems to be the prudent move; This crisis clearly shows that the league is not ready to start playing again, and given COVID’s insidious nature, the outbreak may even motivate other leagues to reconsider opening or continue their own seasons.
In other words, it seems entirely possible that Trump would not have been able to launch that first launch next month, even if he had kept the invitation. Still, we had the new version of real baseball for a few days there, and I tried to enjoy it while it was still present.
Instead, I was invited to Trump to the city he nearly destroyed before rejecting that invitation with a ball of lies so vile that it would poison a rattlesnake within 20 paces. I can’t wait to see what he does if / when the football season begins, and entire teams kneel in solidarity with the uprising of racial justice that shows no signs of ebb. As with all things Trump, you better bring a helmet and mask.
