It’s been almost a month since the NBA, NHL and almost every other professional sports league shut down their season in the best interest of public health and safety. The unprecedented action has caused not just economic ripple effects far and wide, but also stripped fans of a much needed sense of normalcy. As we live through a global health crisis, the kind the world hasn’t seen for over a hundred years, there’s been an understandable yearning to get things back to how they way they used to be. In the past few days though, that headlong rush to try to get sports back has proved just how little fans and leagues value the health and safety of their athletes.
On Saturday afternoon, President Trump, in his usual ineffectual bluster, said that he hoped sports would be back “very soon” and that he believed that the NFL season would kick off as normal by September, with fans in the stands. On Monday, ESPN reported that the NHL was considering holding the post-season across a few arenas, “with multiple teams playing at a single site.” On Tuesday, ESPN’s Jeff Passen also reported on MLB’s plan to start the season in May by quarantining players in Arizona for over four months. The NBA has said in the past that isolating players in Vegas to play games is also an option. In addition to that, Dana White told TMZ that he’d planned to purchase an entire private island and fly fighters in so the UFC could get back to normal.
In the absence of sports, thinking about when sports will return and what that will look like has become the new national pass time. The barrage of plans though amounts to nothing more than speculation, as no one knows what’s happening with the state of the virus and how it spreads throughout the world. Health experts, epidemiologists, doctors, nurses, scientists, have all cautioned that rushing things could lead to potential worse outbreaks, and yet, leagues are still throwing out plans under the guise that getting sports up and running is somehow the most important thing in the world.
It’s not. It’s not even close.
The current coronavirus death count in the US stands at 11,000 and is likely to climb higher and higher in the coming days and weeks. We haven’t succeeded in flattening the curve, and New York City, ravaged by disease, is considering temporarily burying their dead in public parks. Things are utterly bleak, and in the midst of acute human suffering, the MLB has the audacity to throw this bit into their plan to jumpstart the season.
The plan could include teams carrying significantly expanded rosters to account for the possibility of players testing positive despite the isolation, as well as to counteract the heat in Phoenix, which could grow problematic during the summer, sources said.
People are dying en masse and yet, the MLB thinks it’s acceptable to simply staff up a few more players should anyone get sick. It’s a despicable clause, and a shocking admission of just how little the well being of players actually matters. For the sake of the game and all its attendant profits, a little human suffering is a worthwhile sacrifice.
The fact that leagues are willing to rush their athletes into scenarios that would compromise their health and safety is not just unconscionable, but frankly ghoulish. Athletes aren’t a disposable commodity, yet they’re certainly being treated as such. Their value has always been in relation to the amount of money their bodies are able to generate, yet the virus has laid bare just how gruesome the exchange is. Players will do anything for a chance to play, yet that shouldn’t be the bottom line at the moment. The excessive measures every league would have to take to make sure games happen with even the illusion of safety just proves how far away we actually are from things starting back up again.
It’s not the time to think about sports coming back. People are struggling in unforeseen ways across the country and before we can even breath a hint of normalcy, they safety of everyone involved has to be considered. Sports are great, but it’s not worth anyone dying over.
