WHISTLING DIXIE

               I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Edward Murphy, an otherwise obscure gentleman who was the reputed author of the “law” widely attributed to him, the one that holds that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. A little research revealed that he was a U.S. Air Force engineer who, in the 1950s, was seeking to measure how gravitational forces affect pilots but whose tests were constantly thwarted by malfunctioning equipment.  It makes sense that the saying has military roots; the similar term “snafu” also traces back to the armed forces.

               The people who run our major spectator sports should be giving particular attention to Mr. Murphy’s dictum as they prepare to go back into business. By me their pronouncements to date on the subject amount mostly to wishful thinking, detached as they are from what just about everyone knows about the pandemic that’s keeping much of the world shut down. I like sports as much as the next person, and maybe more than most, but I am not holding my breath that they’ll return for long in any form before a vaccine makes it safe to go back in the water, as it were.

               Even without fans in the stands, and putting aside the seemliness of playing games while about 1,000 Americans die each day from the COVID-19 virus, most of sports’ back-to-work protocols are complex affairs, with more moving parts than a moon rocket. At the controls won’t be Elon Musk but team execs whose specialties are assembling playing-field talent and selling tickets for people to watch it. Certainly, most of the working components will be turned over to outside contractors, but only the sports guys will have all the reins in hand.

               The difficulties involved in saving the teams’ seasons have begun even before those plans can be implemented. Major League Baseball and its players’ union currently are in negotiations to determine how players will be paid for a truncated schedule. An informal deadline of this week has been set if play is to resume by July 4, but reports indicate that the two sides are far apart. The latest management proposal reportedly calls for pay cuts of up to 75% for the highest-paid players, hardly an attractive proposition for jobs that will involve a clear health risk. Basketball and hockey, the two other sports whose returns dictate shrunken game cards, have yet to begin serious pay talks.

               Another obstacle could be the availability and efficacy of tests to identify those in the teams’ retinues who carry the virus and, therefore, have the capacity to infect others. The number of tests required would vary by the size of rosters, with the NBA at the low end with its 15-man squads and the NFL at the top at about 50.  But add in coaches, trainers, equipment managers, refs or umps, TV and radio people and other supernumeraries and those figures would be multiplied by a factor of two or three. If daily testing were the rule, as it should be, the 30-team NBA would require more than 1,000 tests and test results a day. Multiple that by about three for the NFL.

The issue of availability is heightened by the fact that testing isn’t widely available in the U.S. at large. Money can buy just about anything, and the leagues no doubt can shoulder their way to the head of that line, but it can’t make the tests more reliable. There are a lot of different tests out there and, reportedly, false positives and negatives are a problem with some.

Social distancing is a key to containing the virus, and it goes without saying that there isn’t much of that in team sports. Of our Big Three, baseball affords the most, but MLB still will have to stand on its head to separate its players. No-high-fiving and no-spitting rules are in its proposed protocol, and players may have to dress and shower in their hotel rooms. Between innings and at other times, some players will have to occupy seats in the stands rather than share dugouts or bullpens. In basketball and football, forget it—they’re contact sports where the players just about live in one another's pockets in season. In the first few minutes of every basketball game all 10 players on the court will have handled the same, sweaty ball.

All of the plans to resume play have the players and their satellites squirreled away in hotel “bubbles” for the season’s duration, safely away from contagion. Trouble is, those bubbles are only figures of speech. Confining dozens of young, wealthy and willful men to a monastic existence for months on end strains credulity. The veteran NBA player Jared Dudley said on the radio the other day that “every team has a Dennis Rodman, even if his hair isn’t blue or green.” My guess is that several Rodmans per is more like it.

Keeping people out of the bubbles also might be difficult; fans likely will gather around the empty ball parks or team hotels, jockeying for a look at their heroes. Social isolation could be eased in part by allowing family members in, but that would raise as many problems as it solves. How about girl friends? Or school kids, who’d have to come and go daily if schools reopen? Further, while the players would be kept busy baseballing or footballing, how would their wives, etc., pass the time? A no-shopping rule would be as tough to enforce as the one banning spitting.

And if the pros will have a tough time returning to action, what about the colleges? Unless the NCAA finally fesses up and admits that college has nothing to do with college sports, how could teams separate their athletes from daily contact with the rest of the student body, were classes in session?  If Edward Murphy were alive he’d be licking his chops.