The 4-Game MLB Season
By 
Welp, that was fun while it lasted for…a weekend.
Two MLB games Monday night are being postponed because of an outbreak of the coronavirus among the Miami Marlins.
The Marlins’ home opener against the Baltimore Orioles is off, as well as the Philadelphia Phillies‘ home game against the Yankees, a source confirmed to ESPN’s Marly Rivera. The Marlins just completed a series in Philadelphia, and eight more players and two coaches with the Marlins tested positive for the coronavirus. An outbreak has spread throughout their clubhouse and brought the total cases in recent days to at least 14, sources familiar with the situation told ESPN’s Jeff Passan and Jesse Rogers.
The Marlins remain in Philadelphia and continue to undergo testing. Baltimore general manager Mike Elias confirmed that the game in Miami was postponed.
Before the Phillies-Yankees game was postponed, the Yankees were informed that the visitors’ clubhouse had been completely fumigated several times, sources told Rivera. The Yankees also brought their own clubhouse personnel down from New York City to work the game, but those actions don’t appear to be enough.
One presumes this places the entire mini-season in jeopardy since you can’t have a few teams just not playing games for two weeks. And there’s no reason to think this won’t be the only outbreak.
I just find this so frustrating. Look, it would be nice to live in a better nation, like New Zealand or Germany or…Vietnam (the better nation won the war!). But we don’t. We live in a deeply broken nation whose response to COVID-19 has been made vastly worse by our horrible president but which has touched on issues far deeper in what has become of this nation’s people than just Donald Trump.
As I’ve said since March, we are just going to have to accept the reality of our broken nation and live with this. We really have two choices. It would nice to say that we have three choices, which is locking down the nation again for a month and then having a real strategy to contain COVID-19 like so many other nations, but let’s go back to what I was saying about dealing with real America instead of fantasy America. Given that, the choices, at least as concern sports, are as follows:
- Allow players to play if they choose with the knowledge that they will probably get COVID-19. Plan to keep them as healthy as possible with the best possible healthcare and just play on with the expanded rosters.
- Don’t play sports at all until there is a vaccine.
These are the choices. I have no problem with either choice, especially if players have a choice and given their age and extreme health. But what I can’t abide is Americans pretending that they can have sports and not see the virus spread and then halt the season as soon as the obvious happens. Maybe this can be done with the NBA bubble. But it certainly can’t be done with travel such as baseball and football are going to have.
And so here we are, our disaster of a nation once again being shown to the rest of the world.