This 2020 baseball season falters, a space built on dubious foundations, with two definitive walls that can cause occupants to flee before it collapses.
On the one hand: the constant spectrum of COVID-19 itself, which has devastated most Miami Marlins, threatens to do the same with the St. Louis Cardinals and weighs on the minds of athletes and staff.
On the other hand: baseball’s own detail, where the mitigation of the virus compromises what we have called in easier times “the integrity of the game”.
This preference for integrity is now replaced by a preference: play nine innings (or less) and go out and get to bed as soon as possible.
Just all the collective shoulder shrugs and tight lips that the game has endured in two weeks:
Take the Blue Jays out of Canada and send them on tour all year? I don’t care.
A runner placed in the games at the moment? Course.
“At home” play in the stadium of your opponents? Why not.
Seven-inning doubles, as if it were a more glorified college tournament than the highest point in baseball in the world? Do what you have to do.
Call cavalry baseball recruiting players on the street and taking advantage of their “alternative education site” to form a team? Hey, the next man.
Determine playoff venues through win percentage, even if a team plays about 50 games while playing 60? October doesn’t wait for anyone.
Do you spend the most out of your pre-game preparation not on spray boards, batting practices or video analysis, but in tests of more than a hundred players and club staff after an inflamed team has passed through its stadium?
As the players say, it’s just one of its components.
The last situation spread Friday after two St. Louis Cardinals players tested positive for COVID-19 days after gambling at Target Field in Minneapolis. Meanwhile, the Twins and the Cleveland Indians had already played a game there, but after the Marlins coronavirus typhoon in Philadelphia, 21 players and staff tested positive, plus two Members of the Phillies staff, nothing was left to chance.
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MARLINS: Team stops 2020 season after COVID-19 outbreak
And rightly so. With this in mind, Target Field has been remodeled in a clinic without an appointment, with twins appearing every hour of the day for the test, some of them still expect less of the nasal swab at the point of service. more than 3 hours before the first release.
“There’s a lot we can do about baseball until today’s game,” said Twins manager Rocco Baldelli.
Let’s avoid our COVID-19 mentality for a moment and think about it. The Twins and Indians finished 1-2 in the Central Division of the American League last season and, to the extent that those things can be expected, deserve to fight in the same way this 60-game season.
With a little 50 games to play this season, that’s what we might call a great series. And yet 113 pages of protocols still fail to isolate two groups that obviously did all the right thing to get around this pandemic.
“It’s anything we don’t miss,” Baldelli said before his team beat the Indians 4-1. “It was a day. There are still boys waiting outside for the test.
“These are the realities our boys live with. They know it. They took everything pretty well and I’m sure it would probably be no different.”
And that’s before at least five other Cardinals players and staff tested positive, postponing the first game of the series in Milwaukee and probably the entire series.
This would lead to 15 makeup games in a season already compressed in just 66 days.
It was amazing to hear the scary tones of hardened players, managers and executives, only to see them turn a transfer and compete at a world-class point a few minutes later.
However, how long can they do it? How much longer can the walls be closed?
In the end, the 17 players who retired from the season would possibly seem visionary; The basis of the Marlins moment, Isan Diaz, joined the organization on Saturday with a heartbreaking job.
Dodgers starter David Price still couldn’t sing about the protection of Opt-out Land when the Marlins outbreak occurred, and there were actually active players who nodded with him.
Stephen Strasburg, who will remain the Most Valuable Player of the World Series until the game can safely organize another Autumn Classic, raised eyebrows but also explained why solving a nervous challenge in his throwing hand made no sense in 2020.
“To be honest, this season is a disaster at first, so I have to do a review here,” Strasburg said after being eliminated from the second game for the Washington Nationals. “This is my career.
“I know that, in the long run, it is vital to check to make as many departures as possible, and if you put yourself in a compromised position now, I don’t know if that’s the most productive way forward.”
It’s hard to believe this won’t be any stranger or uglier. It was only 10 days before Major League Baseball introduced the blame game, rebuking the Marlins for breaking protocols, as if he could definitively hint at the epidemic in a bar or nightclub and not in the team of one of the maximum coronaviruses. – soaked counties in the country.
We’ll see what comes from the obvious appearance of the cardinals.
In addition, it was not the Marlins players who scheduled a careless pit prevention in Atlanta to play two absolutely insignificant exhibition games. Sure, they voted to play the Phillies when an epidemic swept through their clubhouse, but that shouldn’t be their decision.
There was no transparent protocol to avoid a game, as shown on Friday by twins general manager Derek Falvey. This lesson has been learned the hard way and we believe that any of the groups and the league will act much more aggressively to avoid the game in the future.
The Marlins have yet to put a team in a combination. On Friday night, the Baltimore Orioles traded one of their most trusted relievers, left-handed Richard Bleier, to Miami. How does it feel to be transferred to a team that rents buses to send their inflameds from Philadelphia to Miami?
“I hope everything is under control,” Bleier told reporters after his last game as An Oriole. “I’m getting into a damaging situation. It’s something I’m aware of, but I’m not too worried. They won’t take me somewhere where there’s a problem.”
You don’t think like that.
Lessons are learned, protocols have been duplicated, and things are said to be easier to solve. There are still 52 to 57 games left, depending on the skill with which your computer has avoided the virus.
After contemplating everything you committed to just to get 8 games, it’s hard to believe what the game will look like after 52 more.
Especially if the walls gradually continue to close.