“Athletes are young and healthy, let them get it.”
“We need everyone to get COVID so we can get herd immunity.”
“Who cares, I just want to get baseball back.”
Welcome to the United States, where all kinds of people are standing on their heads to justify the return of professional sports during a global pandemic like the one this country has not seen in over 100 years. It doesn’t matter that the cases are increasing Hot spots across the country (in many places that have major league teams), or expert estimate that we could soon reach 100,000 new cases per day, or that Texas Children’s Hospital You have to treat adult patients to free up space for COVID cases in other hospitals.
But … Baseball!
If you’re one of the people who shrugs about MLB players risking their health and the health of those around them because you’re sick of sports documentaries and want some live games, and MLB players are anyway all young and in great shape and no increased risk of COVID complications, you should know about Tommy Hottovy.
At 38, Tommy Hottovy is the young pitching coach for the Chicago Cubs. He’s in great shape and let’s say when my radio co-host (also a woman) and I were told that we were going to interview him at Cubs Con in January, it didn’t bother us.
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Hottovy now has 45 days without hiring COVID-19. Yesterday he spoke on ZOOM. to reporters. He detailed how he lost 18 pounds in 30 days, didn’t sleep between midnight and 6 a.m. every night, had fevers that broke 100 ° six days in a row.
“Crushed me” Hottovy said. He stoppedor wipe the tears away several times throughout the call.
Hottovy says he spoke yesterday because he wants people to learn from his ordeal. But at this point, it seems like Major League Baseball no longer learned anything.
Despite COVID “embers,” as White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany likes to call them (or, as I mean, “places you shouldn’t go under any circumstances right now”), increasing in places like Dallas, Houston , Phoenix and Tampa, MLB is still moving forward with a bubble-free plan to play baseball this year. The consequences, and there will be consequences, will be condemned.
Today, Mexico announced that it has close professional baseball For the first time in 95 years, to say that the Mexican Baseball League could not guarantee the safety of its fans or players. Taking people’s safety into account is a novel idea. Last week in Chicago, Cubs President of Business Operations Crane Kenny was publicly contemplating how many fans the team would be allowed to enter Wrigley Field. That notion was quickly rejected by Mayor Lori Lightfoot, but it’s just another example of baseball jumping headlong into the unknown with little respect for anything other than profit.
Yesterday, the positive test rate for Arizona, where the Diamondbacks are located and where many MLB players reside in the offseason, was 24 percent. TWENTY-FOUR PERCENT! This means that almost a third of the examinees tested positive. However, Major League Baseball is ready and willing to allow boys from places like Arizona, Texas and Florida to climb into hermetically sealed aluminum tubes and fly across the country, taking any viral load they bring with them, to cities like Chicago and New York, where citizens took COVID extremely seriously and managed to control the infection rate.
And sports media, for the most part, seems to be doing extremely well with all of this, as many only report spin and injury rates and camp listings as if 2020 were any other season.
Let’s be clear: This is not like any other season.
COVID-19 took a young, healthy boy like Tommy Hottovy and so severely decimated his health and well-being that he burst into tears at the memory of him. And Hottovy had access to the best medical care: He received treatment at Northwestern University in Chicago and had the support of the Cubs and his family to help him. But what about all the people MLB will leave behind who don’t have the same resources as Hottovy? What kind of care will clubhouse attendants, team bus drivers, and food service workers receive? What about the people who clean the clubhouses and wash the players?
Sure, they’ll all be tested. But what happens when those tests are positive? And that? How many of them will have access to the breathing apparatus and antibodies
Hottovy was dealt with?
Remember, there is no “bubble” involved in the baseball plan. And since even tbubbles don’t workWhat positive result is MLB imagining?
We should also keep in mind that many MLB athletes, at least anecdotallyThey are extremely conservative. Who knows where the effectiveness of wearing masks falls? Even players who don’t take a political stance on COVID-19 could be inadvertently spreading it. Earlier this week, Cubs pitcher Jose Quintana posted a photo of himself with Tom Brady on Instagram. Brady has been working with his new teammates Bucs against the advice of the team doctors and generally refuse social distance.
I’m someone who posts that nasty Rogers Hornsby Quote on Twitter every year after the season ends and he sits, every winter, looking out the window and waiting for spring. I mean, I have a deep and permanent love for baseball. It’s not just the sound of summer, IT IS my summer.
But someone has to sound the alarm here. We cannot continue running facing “everything will be fine” when it is not entirely clear that things will be fine. Despite the titled fans who love to say “I pay your salary!” For ball players on social media, the bottom line is that ball players don’t owe us anything. They certainly don’t owe us their health or the well-being of their families and friends just to ease our boredom with Netflix.
This is not going to work. People will get sick. People can die. Rob Manfred, for the sake of your players and your sport, turn it off.
.
