When will this nightmare end? Americans are dealing with two fronts; the civil unrest and a deadly disease ravaging through the countryside are just two of the biggest.
We all want normalcy right now but unfortunately that might not happen for a while.
And Dr. Anthony Fauci echoed that sentiment recently and has some terrible news for all Major League Baseball fans.
The NBA is the league that is on the forefront of American sports figuring out how to continue the season while navigating through this mess. It’s a tall task where there are no easy solutions. One of the suggestions floating around is to play out the rest of the season in one city like Orlando, Florida or Las Vegas, Nevada so that it’s easier to mitigate risk of Covid-19 spread.
And to make matters worse, you have representatives inside the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) who think it’s a bad idea to finish the season for optics reasons. Vice President and Brooklyn Nets point guard, Kyrie Irving, peddled an obnoxious take that the players finishing the season, while owners “force them to play,” is a bad look while there is civil unrest in the streets.
How to argue that is rather simple, which is to show him how selfish that take is. Irving seems to be confused about sports as an industry and the jobs that depend on him to do his like stadium employees, equipment managers, sports betting, journalism and the hundreds of other jobs that will be gone if he doesn’t quit whining about doing what he was paid to do.
But unfortunately, it’s probably a moot point because the NBA planned return is still up in the air.
And it’s not just the NBA, it’s likely all American sports leagues.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease, said that the baseball season would need to end before the predicted second wave of the coronavirus hits.
Dr. Fauci said, “If the question is time, I would try to keep it in the core summer months and end it not with the way we play the World Series, until the end of October when it’s cold. I would avoid that.”
According to ESPN: “The league has been consistent in its insistence that the regular season end Sept. 27, citing health concerns, as well as the desire of national TV partners not to have games extend into November. The union’s most recent proposal of 89 games would have had the regular season end in mid-October. Coronavirus cases have been on the rise even in warmer areas of the country as some states begin to open up. But Fauci said that if baseball is going to be played, it should be done mostly in the summer.”
If Dr. Fauci is right then that means all American sports will likely fall under the same guidelines.
But, again, do doctors and scientists really have an accurate projection on what the unpredictable coronavirus will actually do.
Dr. Fauci added, “This virus is one that keeps fooling us,” Fauci said. “Under most circumstances — but we don’t know for sure here — viruses do better when the weather starts to get colder and people start spending more time inside, as opposed to outside. The community has a greater chance of getting infected. The likelihood is that, if you stick to the core summer months, you are better off, even though there is no guarantee. If you look at the kinds of things that could happen, there’s no guarantee of anything. You would want to do it at a time when there isn’t the overlap between influenza and the possibility of a fall second wave.”
One thing people aren’t mentioning when it comes to the long run of this season is that no matter which team wins the championship in their respective sport, there will always be an asterisk next to it in the history books because of everything going on.
You can bet that most players and journalists will think it wasn’t a real season, so they will probably measure it as a half or quasi-championship. If that’s the case, then what’s the point of playing?
