What an opportunity this was. Batter up. Fat pitch, grooved right down the middle. Should have been a towering home run. Nothing but cheering. Everybody uplifted. Instead? Whiff.
Baseball struck out.
There was every opportunity for owners and players to set aside their mutual greed, find a compromise, lead sports out of this pandemic and help a nation that needs it find its way back to normal.
It would have been symbolic: America's pastime stepping up to reclaim the mantle it lost. Baseball, there for us when we needed it most. There had been a grand plan, once, remember? Start the season around the Fourth of July. Perfect. Baseball, fireworks and apple pie.
Instead, it is the other sports that have a plan. The NBA, NHL and MLS soccer all have come to agreements on reporting dates later this summer, a no-fans resumption plan. The PGA Tour and NASCAR already have restarted. Even the NFL and college football have plans in place.
While America's pastime continues to let America down.
While baseball _ in the midst of the ongoing coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic and national protests in the name of George Floyd and other victims of racial inequality _ continues to put itself above all else.
The very notion that baseball's owners and players might each sacrifice a little money for the good of the country, for the fans, is naive to even suggest, I guess, as both sides wear blinders and seem to see only money.
There was so much goodwill to be gained here by the sport that most desperately needs it _ the sport whose glacier's pace of play is at such odds with the instant-everything proclivities of millennials.
There is an opportunity here for a shortened baseball season to be a Petri dish for needed change. The very idea of 162 games (after a too-long spring training) might be a fundamental part of the problem. Use 2020 to see how a shorter season feels, to experiment with pace-of-play improvements. Mic everybody up. Try stuff.
Instead what we are seeing of sports coming out of the pandemic is a perfect reflection of baseball not keeping up, stuck or falling behind.
There will be a season. Commissioner Rob Manfred can mandate a shortened schedule likely to be 48 or 50 regular season games followed by a postseason, even without the blessing of the MLB Players Association. but it would likely start later than the other sports and find neither side happy. It would be a restart dogged by an asterisk and acrimony.
The MLBPA, in its latest response to an MLB restart proposal: "It unfortunately appears that further dialogue with the league would be futile. It's time to get back to work. Tell us when and where."
The players have been holding out for a longer season with full pro-rated salaries based on games played, something agreed to in March. Owners have been proposing fewer games and additional salary cuts.
(While the kids whose attention baseball should be trying to get are busy playing Madden and NBA2K).
The perception is owners _ some of whom reportedly would rather scrap the entire 2020 season and cut losses _ are trying to squeeze every dime they can and crying poor all the while.
Have I mentioned that MLB and Turner Sports just agreed to a billion-dollar contract extension to continue broadcasting postseason games beyond 2021? Should you ever hear a baseball owner singing the financial blues, either laugh in his face, or slap it. (Although if you slap it, don't say I put you up to it).
Baseball will survive this, of course. The game is too ingrained in Americana. We love it by habit, as if duty-bound.
Baseball survived the 1919 Black Sox scandal, and Pete Rose gambling, and the strike that wiped out the 1994 World Series, and the Steroids Era. It will survive the sign-stealing that now stains it. It would survive the lockout looming as the Collective Bargaining Agreement expires in December 2021.
And it will survive the way it is mishandling the restart of it season in the middle of a pandemic.
It may not always be so as its fan base grays, but it is still true, for now.
Baseball survives despite itself.
