It's gonna happen people. Barring some terrible case explosion we are going to get at least some mostly real baseball in just one week.
God bless our love of money
The MLB and NBA experiments are the canaries in the coal mines for team sports. MLB - with it being an outside sport that relies on very little close contact and the NBA - with it's hardcore bubble plan - are trying to see if you can actually make it work. If these fail then other team sports - hockey, soccer, football - can't succeed. So far - it's working.
How long will it last? Well there are several thoughts on the matter. It might last as long as there are players willing to play. The owners and leagues want it to continue so even if it ends up a glorified AAA game they may still play it. Or it may last until enough players get sick on a few teams to throw the whole thing out. You quarantine 30 players a piece on 6 teams basically suspending their play for 2 weeks and the schedule falls apart. Or it may last until a player gets extremely sick or dies. While I'm surely liability waivers cover the leagues for this, they can't make up for the bad publicity. If leagues push on against the wishes of most involved because players will play for the money and it happens again? That's the kind of thing that gets you a Player's Basketball Association in 2023.
We'll see. Personally I ran the numbers and think the chance of a death/serious illness is slim for MLB/NBA. NHL with a little less stringent bubble and bigger rosters than the NBA playing an indoor sport might be a little more likely but still I think the problem really comes when football camps start. I think with THAT many players and the different "in-shape" requirements for them you are going to get some bad results. That may not only tip the NFL to not start but could have ramifications into other leagues.
But I'm being a downer now. Baseball in one week. I'll take it.
6 comments:
I'm glad to see the blog is back! Looking forward to next week and having that daily distraction of Nats baseball! Let's go defend that title!
Harper how much do you think location matters? You make good points about the NBA being a hardcore bubble and having less people per team than the NHL, but they are in Florida and the NHL is doing their play-in/play-off series in Canada. Do you think that makes a difference, or no because it's a bubble.
Will the 60 game season happen? The vote by mail lobby needs this virus to be so frightening that they succeed in their voter fraud scheme. Therefore I see the same political pressure put on MLB as the NFL to close. It only takes an "outbreak" to cancel and they are very good at faking test results. If we get baseball, great, but as all DC fans know, the influence of these people was great enough to destroy the Redskins' heritage, and if you see the MLB and NFL 2020 seasons totally destroyed, remember who did it in November.
AND anyone who thinks we can talk baseball as unrelated to politics, after what happened to the redskins, get real.
Max B - Me too!
mike k - if the bubble holds it shouldn't matter where they are. But given that I think location matters most in terms of players getting it and the sport matters most in terms of spreading it. So I think it's more likely that NBA players will get it (assuming bubble doesn't hold) but a case in the NHL is more likely to lead to cancellation.
Until we can figure testing out, I'm still pessimistic about the season lasting very long. You really need to be testing the players at minimum every week, and you need to be able to get those results within 24-48 hours. Otherwise, things can get out of hand very quickly. Transmission between clubhouses is probably relatively low-likelihood, but within a clubhouse it can spread like wildfire. And what happens when a team has to remove itself from the schedule for 2 weeks? You just can't quarantine a whole team and expect it to work, you need to be able to remove just the individual players. But that requires rigorous testing which I don't think we'll have.
CP - apparently teams are spreading out the personnel so it's not 25 guys + coaches in one clubhouse. Using luxury boxes other places as temporary clubhouses for a couple guys so there isn't a good chance of 1 to many spread.
The issue so far has been people that need 1 on 1 time with multiple players. Like a trainer. not going to hire 20 of them
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