If you are a hard time to get sports because they started again during the coronavirus pandemic, you are not alone. The athletes who play also have difficulty with this.
Bruins goalkeeper Tuukka Rask was very honest about his feelings on Thursday night, following Boston’s 3-2 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes in Game 2 of their best-of-seven first-round series in the Stanley Cup playoffs.
“To be honest with you, it doesn’t really feel like play-off hockey there,” Rask said, as reported by NBC Sports Boston. “There are no fans, so it’s fun to play an exhibition game. There is absolutely no playoff atmosphere there. You try and play as hard as you can. When you play on an ice rink and an ice rink and the fans cheer for and against you, it really creates a buzz for the series.
‘That’s nothing. That it feels sometimes, just like stupid, sometimes. There are moments when there are scrums and what not, and then there will be five minutes when it’s from hockey to shore. There is no atmosphere. That it feels like an exhibition game. We try our best to clean up, get engaged and make it feel like it’s a playoff game.
Over in the NBA, Sacramento Kings guard Kent Bazemore was a little more benevolent in his take, noting what his team could gain from the experience of playing in the bubble.
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“It’s a good learning experience for a very young team that has not been in a playoff atmosphere,” said Bazemore, as reported by The Sacramento Bee. “I think the intensity below is reminiscent of the playoffs without the 20,000 people, so it’s an experience for a lot of guys.”
While the NHL plays in a completely fan-free atmosphere, the NBA has handled court video cards with live streams of jubilant fans. That maybe it’s a little closer to normal, but it’s still not quite the same. In Major League Baseball, of course, there are no fans, but the setup differs from ballpark to ballpark, with some with cardboard cuts of fans, some using tarps with advertisements on them, which cover empty seats, and some just au naturel with rows go rows of unoccupied chair rows.
And how is the baseball season going so far, relative to normal? In this case, the answer can be retrieved via some statistical indicators, instead of comments from players about the situation.
So far, Major League Baseball has played about 11 percent of the value of a typical season game, not a definite sample size, but also not unimportant.
The handball average over the majors is .239, just two points above the .237 average compiled by major league teammates in 1968, the “Year of the Pitcher.” It’s lower than the .244 of 1972, after which the American League instituted the designated heat rule, and that’s with a DH now in both leagues and enough players really locked up in those three boys – Charlie Blackmon, DJ LeMahieu , and Donovan Solano, have hit more than .400 so far. Teams are averaging 1.53 doubles per game, which would be the lowest rate since 1989.
Those numbers alone would suggest dominant pitching, but that’s not what happens either. Pitchers hand over home games at a rate of 1.31 per team game, the second-highest rate in history behind 1.39 last year. Teams hit 8.75 hits per game, close to 8.81 from last year, but it is worth noting that there has been no year-on-year decline in strikeouts since a drop from 6.55 to 6.30 per team game in 2004 and 2005. Teams spend 3.45 walks per game, the highest rate since 2000, but only 0.09 intentional walks per game, the lowest rate ever. And the average game now includes just one hitbatsman, who would break the record high of 0.94 set in 1898. And no, it’s not something everyone throws at the Astros – their hitters have been plunked 10 times, tied for 10th in the major and well behind the Mets’ 18-point count that takes one for the team.
This all adds up to teams scoring 4.64 runes per game – right between the 4.45 of 2018 and the 4.83 of 2019. But those underlying figures point to relatively normal results achieved through a simultaneous degradation in quality of both hitting and pitching.
Will this all improve as athletes shake off the rest of several months out of action while becoming more accustomed to the experience of playing for no one? Perhaps. For now, even though we have sports back, they are not close to the level we are used to seeing.
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