TAKE ME OUT WITH THE CROWD?

 

               The reality of the Covid 19 pandemic came home to me a year ago yesterday when I showed up at the Turf Paradise horse track in Phoenix, Arizona, to occupy my usual Saturday carrel in the place’s Players Club, and found it closed. Sure, I’d heard about the disease, but cases in the area in which I live numbered only in the dozens, and had caused little stir. Within a few days baseball would cancel its spring training and the NBA and NHL would suspend their seasons. The spring and summer to come would be a virtual winter in the world of sports.

               Now the physical world has come a full 360 degrees and the Texas Rangers just announced they would open their 2021 home season to full attendance of 40,000-plus on April 5, thus marking the symbolic if not the real end to this unique chapter in American sports history. Whether 40,000 brave (or foolhardy) souls can be mustered to complete that particular circle remains to be seen, but it’s Texas so the answer probably is yes.  Good luck to them and to the rest of us.

               Fact is, to go or not to go to any sort of gathering has been pretty much up to us from the outset of the pandemic, and will remain so until the danger passes. A national vaccination process is in full swing while thousands of people die daily from the affliction. The ideological tug of war over mask wearing continues to muddle rather than clarify our decisions. The fear of dying on the last day of a war is stronger in some than in others.

               Thanks to our elderliness, wife Susie and I have been vaccinated, altering our risk assessments considerably, but the no-no go decision remains. I voted for “go” last Thursday when my also-vaxed friend Harvey Volin came up with tickets to a Chicago Cubs-Colorado Rockies spring training game at Salt River Field in Scottsdale, about 15 minutes from my home. The place seats about 12,000 people but this spring that figure has been reduced by about 80% for covid reasons.

               Aside from an inflated price tag of $57 per, the experience was both enjoyable and edifying. Parking was easy and seating for the 2,200 folks in attendance was comfortable, the ambience being close to that of the annual Fall League games at the park.  People sat in scattered groups of two, three or four, with the other seats made unsittable by plastic ziplocks.

Masks were supposed to be required and just about everyone wore one, no small matter in this famously maverick state. Outside the stands social distancing was suggested by the “stand here” ground stickers at the gates and concession stands, but those were mostly ignored. More effective was the closing of every other urinal in the men’s rest rooms.

Concessions were cashless, peanuts and sunflower seeds verboten. Hots dogs came in plastic containers, drinks in bottles. All very spic and span. Look for the same arrangements for at least a month after most regular-season games commence in the double-and-triple decked stadia of the Bigs. Even vaccinated I wouldn’t feel right sitting shoulder to shoulder with my fellow citizens while the virus still rages and some 90% of the population hasn’t had their shots, but those precautions make sense.

I wasn’t surprised that corporate baseball was up for staging post-quarantine games because they’ve done well generally since resuming play last July. So, too, have our other major professional team leagues. If you follow this space you know that I wasn’t optimistic that our Big Four (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL) could handle their returns. That’s partly because protecting their casts under dire circumstances would be a major undertaking, far outside the usual for their narrowly focused enterprises. I further doubted that the rich and entitled men who make up the teams would sit still for the discipline that would be required.

It’s helped that the virus has been relatively kind to the young and healthy; only a handful of the notable jocks who’ve been infected have suffered more than mild symptoms (Freddie Freeman, Jayson Tatum and Von Miller were among the exceptions). It’s also helped that the leagues have the kind of money and clout that allowed them to elbow to the front of lines to obtain the virus-testing and contact-tracking capabilities others could only envy.  

Their response wasn’t perfect, of course. Games were canceled or postponed, schedules were knocked out of whack, teams played shorthanded. Empty stands became the new normal, weird even with the crowd noises the teams skillfully conjured up for the benefit of the television audiences.  

In total, though, the leagues performed admirably, and the entertainment they produced provided a welcome respite from virus-enforced monotony. We waited out the virus without sports from mid-March through June, and with them from then on. With was better.

During World War II President Roosevelt was asked to halt Major League Baseball for the duration, on grounds that the games consumed scarce resources and their crowds presented tempting targets for saboteurs. He refused, citing baseball’s contribution to civilian morale. Much the same thing can be said for our pro leagues today.