COVID-19 attacks clubhouses, endangers staffs. It’s time to end the MLB season
There’s a reminder of the way baseball used to be right outside my hotel room window.
Across the street from the Hyatt Regency in Milwaukee is the Calderone Club, which opened in the city in 1979. It’s an old school Italian joint, and when the Cardinals opened the 2019 season with a road trip to play the Brewers, St. Louis Post-Dispatch baseball writer and winner of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s J.G. Taylor Spink award Rick Hummel arranged a dinner there for some of the St. Louis baseball writers on the trip.
We watched the team work out at Miller Park from the field and dugout, did a round of interviews through the clubhouse, filed our stories, and settled in for carbs and stories from “Commish.”
It’s a memory from an alternate universe.
The Cardinals and Brewers were postponed on Friday morning by two positive tests for COVID-19 among Cardinals players. Rather than make the same mistake the Miami Marlins made in Philadelphia when, after four positive tests the team somehow decided to take the field the same day, the Cardinals are hopeful that their isolation and contact tracing will stop the virus cold.
We should all hope that they succeed.
Professional baseball in 2020, in whatever form and function can be salvaged, once again hangs in the balance of that success. But so too does the health and safety of countless players — and most importantly, people — in and around the game, all of whom are wedded to its success but whose eyes are wandering to the likelihood of failure.
On days like today, it’s hard to be optimistic.
After postponing Friday’s game and isolating at the team hotel, the Cardinals clarified that Friday’s positive results came from tests taken Wednesday, before the team took the field in Minnesota. That means two players who were active for that game were also active carriers of the virus.
Those players inhabited the dugout, the bullpen, the clubhouse, and then the charter on which the team flew to Milwaukee.
Cleveland filled in those same spaces at Target Field the next night. The Cardinals were 300 miles away by then, a traveling vector of unknown risk. Why, then, is it necessary to pretend that this is still a good idea?
Playing a baseball season in a bubble was never a realistic solution.
Too many players and staff would have to be isolated for far too long and play in unforgiving environments. Besides, it’s not as if transporting a mass of humanity to Arizona, Florida or Texas is likely to be a positive from a public health perspective. The risk might not travel but it certainly wouldn’t diminish.
Cynics and conspiracists will argue that young, healthy ball players are unlikely to suffer long term health effects from COVID-19 infections. Let’s hope they’re right, because at the moment, we have no way of knowing.
Red Sox pitcher Eduardo Rodríguez is dealing with myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart’s lining, as a result of his COVID battle. The disease burst onto the global scene no more than eight months ago. It’s impossible to know what its effects on a body will be in a year, or five, or 10, but early returns aren’t promising.
Mike Ryan, director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program, cited a study from Germany on Thursday which found that a mind-boggling 78 of 100 people who had recovered from COVID-19 had structural changes to their hearts two months after a positive test. Sixty still showed signs of inflammation, as Rodríguez has.
People who are asymptomatic now may show symptoms later. Young and healthy men do not necessarily remain so, and even if they did, what is the ethical rationale for exposing coaches, trainers, transportation staff, hotel employees, and food and beverage vendors to disease vectors in the service of satisfying television contracts?
It’s a moral issue that I struggle with personally.
The Cardinals are scheduled to play 30 road games in 2020; my schedule has me attending 24 of them. I have been to Minneapolis and Milwaukee already this week. Within the next month I’ll add Dyersville, Iowa, Chicago, and Cincinnati to the list. Tack on Kansas City and a few return ventures up north, and I myself am a traveling health risk.
Baseball in 2020 is, to be sure, a unique beast which deserves observance and documentation. I have friends and colleagues who have expressed simultaneous concern for and jealousy of my ability to be on the road. I have defenses of that decision but I have to allow for the possibility that they may be wrong.
I might be making a terrible mistake. We all might.
Two players on the road with the Cardinals have the coronavirus. I could’ve spent my morning checking with sources and trying to track down their identities. I didn’t. I won’t. That’s an ethical line I’m comfortable with. If the team announces the diagnoses, they’ll be reported. That’s good enough.
Instead, I texted a few players the same message this morning: “Stay safe, dude. My best to all you guys.”
Now, I wait for the contact tracers to call. I hope it’s before dinner.
If they clear me, I can call in to the Calderone Club, get my carry out, and pretend things are the way I remember them.
This story was originally published July 31, 2020 at 2:27 PM.
