I offered a lukewarm prediction based more on how unpredictable the past six months have been than any particular idea. Frankly, I don’t even know what it would take to cancel the 2020 MLB season forever, and if my sources do, they don’t say it, but sometimes people outside of baseball ask me if I think someone’s death in the game I would.
When I think about it like that, even speculation seems ethically ambiguous. Who has to die for baseball to grant the coronavirus 2020? Apart from 143,000 people not affiliated with the sport.
They are playing anyway, so I have to want it to work. What does that mean even in a country where the death toll is guaranteed to continue to rise? Is it worth the risk if we don’t bother enjoying baseball? That sounds trivial compared to the pandemic, but dismissing the season as a money raider hurts you more than the owners (who won’t be frustrated by fans who refuse to buy tickets when none are available).
Is the success of the season as suspect as its possible failure if it serves as a convenient distraction at the height of our country’s failure to contain the virus? Does he even say it is an insult to the grim reality of what failure means in this context? Is it a form of deception to focus on the role of spectatorless sports in the midst of a national crisis? Focus on the health of a single person just because he plays baseball? Is it fair to appeal to the players’ sense of personal responsibility to keep their teammates and the industry afloat when our interest creates an economic incentive to put themselves at risk?
That’s an awkward thought, and we’re just getting started.
Reach opening day, we’ve made it, and now comes the hard part: a daily routine of teams congregating and trying to maintain an ambitious testing schedule every other day without the kind of delays that plagued summer camps, while They accepted the ramifications of not testing daily. Interacting with the community, even if only for food, in their towns and on the road. Go on tour even when states try to stop the spread between them.
As they returned to real baseball, the teams have been acting “very cautiously,” canceling practice when results were not received on time, and keeping players in quarantine in accordance with local ordinances. It seems wrong to think that arbitrarily designating a game as “important” to “ranking” will significantly alter this type of risk assessment. But of course, that’s what has to happen, it’s what everyone in baseball is counting on.
The more I try to think about the big picture, bigger than who will win in a showdown between Gerrit Cole and Max Scherzer, sure, but also bigger than if safety protocols are enough to allow an industry to return to work, because even That implies that a pandemic is not a good reason to rethink our relationship with sport and wholesale capitalism: the more questions I have. I say “there are no good options” a lot lately. But maybe he’s a cop. Maybe I just need to look harder.
Instead, they cut me off.
“Yes,” he said in clear terms.
But from there, it becomes more complicated.
Caplan clarified that “I’m not in the camp that says’ Baseball? Who the hell cares? ‘
“I don’t think of baseball or any particular sport as trivial or icing on the cake. I see them as, I’m going to say, essential, “said Caplan.
And for a nation that should be cooped up at home more as a security precaution, consider offering entertainment to a captive audience as a social service, even if it is incidental to the real financial motivations that spur the return of the sport.
A storm is brewing over National Park, where the abbreviated 2020 MLB season is slated to begin Thursday night. (AP Photo / Alex Brandon)
“They don’t want to lose money and they are playing for the television contract, I understand all that,” he said. “But that doesn’t bother me because I think it serves some public good.”
That public good justifies trying. Caplan believes that baseball, frankly, should try a little harder.
“Trying smarter,” he said. Ethics, it seems, is not radical hypothetical. Amorality is in the details.
Caplan prefers the idea of a well-insulated “bubble” like the one the NBA and NHL are building around their athletes. He believes leagues could use less evidence, currently an abuse of resources that tests the ethics of the entire MLB operation, if they remain kidnapped.
“I don’t know if it can work, but I think it’s worth a try,” he said. “Anything that involves big teams traveling all over the place, particularly to the COVID hot spots, I don’t think it’s ethical.”
In a pandemic, then, what is right depends on what is sufficient for the safety of the participants. This does not mean that it is easy, but it is knowable. It is literally science. We can choose to listen to the experts and remain critical. In fact, it is important to do so. Do not let the overwhelming nature of all competing questions and motivations complicate the fact that we can and should question the details.
“In sports, if you can get to the third paragraph without mentioning COVID, you’re probably not writing correctly,” says Caplan. “COVID is the driver when thinking about everything these days in any sport.”
It’s a useful prospect before opening day, and it’s a decent baseline from which to trade. But personally, even as I focus the coronavirus on stories, I still worry about my blind spots and my biases (full disclosure: my job is best when there is baseball). I am concerned with costs that we have not yet considered and the inevitability of human error. I am concerned that we will never know if a summer without baseball would have been safer or stranger.
Baseball returns; Don’t believe anyone who tells you they know what will happen next. The best we can do is accept ambivalence.
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