Sports Are Back... Kinda...

We’ve spent the last four months in a veritable desert of boredom. The COVID-19 pandemic has eliminated most of our chief forms of entertainment, as it’s been unsafe to gather in large groups. No concerts, no movies, and perhaps most notably, no sports. The NBA ended prematurely after three-quarters of a season, as did the NHL. Baseball suspended its season just a couple of weeks before the end of Spring Training, and the MLS postponed its season indefinitely. It got so bleak that we eagerly watched reruns of old games (Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS is my favorite) and indulged in sports that—let’s be honest—aren’t really sports.

Anyone for championship cornhole or marble racing?

But as we hit the dog days of summer, a lifeline finally comes our way. Major professional sports are on the way back! And as our country crumbles under the weight of gross pandemic mismanagement and the continued freedom of the men who murdered Breonna Taylor, sports are a welcome distraction from these ills.

Except… are they welcome? Should they be? Putting aside the idea of distraction from actual problems, how safe or practical is it for these games played? After all, by every current national metric for crowd management for the pandemic, these games even being played is a huge risk. The minimum of these sports has ten people on the floor at any given time, plus officials, coaches, reserves, and press. So how safe is it?

All the sports that are set to return are doing so under conditions that defeat the purpose. The contact sports leagues—the NBA and MLS—are returning in a central “bubble” location, closed off from the general public, and with no fans in attendance. If that weren’t ominous enough, those games will be held at Disney World in Florida, which is currently the worldwide infection epicenter. MLS is currently in the midst of a six-week tournament to crown this year’s MLS Cup champion.

Courtesy of the LA Times

Meanwhile, the NBA begins play on a truncated version of the remainder of the 2019-2020 season on July 31, with only the teams closest to playoff contention allowed to compete. This is problematic to me on several different levels.

For starters, I question the wisdom of keeping a couple hundred highly paid elite athletes in

Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell

one place at a central pandemic hotspot. Most major sports folded up their tents in the aftermath of some of these very same athletes testing positive. Because of the nature of the game, if one person is infected, that one person can infect 50 people during a game within the first few minutes. These athletes are tested every day, of course, but the virus has proven to take at least three days to reach detectable levels while still being fully transmissible. The potential for catastrophe outweighs the benefit here in my mind.

Secondly, part of the excitement of sports is fan engagement. Cheering for your team in the home arena has a demonstrable psychological effect on the opponent. Home-court or home-field advantage is a real thing, and in basketball and baseball more than any other sports, that advantage is crowd noise. Playing to an empty arena, even with artificial crowd noise pumped in, is going to be disorienting to players who are used to playing in front of 30,000 fans a night. If you’re watching at home, that lack of fan engagement can disconnect you from the product on TV, and fans may lose interest.

Also worth noting is that only 22 teams are invited to the NBA’s “bubble” in Orlando: the top 11 teams in the Eastern and Western Conferences. That means that the other eight teams will have gone more than eight months without in-game action by the time they are next able to play, as the NBA has tentatively slotted December 1 for as the beginning of the 2020-21 season. Those teams, including my beloved and long-suffering Knicks, don’t have the opportunity to further develop their young talent the way other mediocre teams do. That lack of opportunity could deepen the competitive gap between those teams and the teams playing at the bubble and put the fans of those teams farther away from watching meaningful basketball.

Major League Baseball’s approach to restarting is slightly different. With the season shrunken to 60 games, teams will only face divisional and geographical rivals in empty stadiums. And while that still leaves the issue of no fans in attendance (and all the trickle-down employment issues that are attached to it), I applaud MLB for not concentrating all the players in one place. However, this only protects the players to the level that the cities they play in have controlled the spread of the virus. Unless all transit is private and all players are quarantined in their own homes or in the ballparks, the chance of incidental infection is high. At the time of this writing, I have not heard what the travel and quarantine rules are for baseball.

I find myself torn between welcoming the impending return of major pro sports as a step toward returning to regular life and being concerned that this is a sign that the populace and the people who make money off them are not taking this virus or its resulting disease seriously enough. I miss sports and the normalcy it represents as much as anyone, but I wouldn’t buy a ticket to a World Series Game right now if you paid me to. I’m willing to bet that quite a few sports fans—and athletes—agree with that. Safety is paramount.

After all, is marble racing really all that bad?

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