The most alarming thing about the video that shows Dallas Goedert getting sucker-punched in South Dakota, besides the sucker punch, is that nobody on camera is wearing a mask. The Eagles tight end is confronting a guy in a bar less than 6 inches away from his possibly COVID-addled mouth. It's as if the United States isn't still in the depths of a 100-year pandemic.
This isn't meant to chastise Goedert; not exactly, anyway. Rather, this is meant to point out that many people will ignore recommendations like those from the South Dakota Department of Health, and they will act carelessly, and they will contract COVID-19. Some of these many people will be athletes. They already are.
A dozen Phillies employees, seven of them players, have tested positive for the coronavirus in the past week, more than one-quarter of the reported 47 positive tests in Major League Baseball as of Wednesday. PGA Tour golfers Nick Watney and Cameron Champ tested positive and the Tour has only held two events. Almost 100 college athletes have tested positive since they returned to campus, mostly football players, including at least 28 football players from Alabama, Clemson, and LSU, the schools that won the last five national championships.
This is the new normal. Any industry that restarts with in-person interaction will feed the virus. If the four major sports leagues expect to reopen before a vaccine is developed, mass-produced, and mass-administered, outbreaks will be as common as foul balls. The U.S. posted its second-highest number of reported cases Tuesday. Eight states are routinely logging record numbers of new cases and hospitalizations, and four of them _ Arizona, Texas, Florida, and Missouri _ are home to seven of Major League Baseball's 30 teams, who will start preparing for their season next week. A few weeks later, football training camps begin at team sites, and those four states are home to eight of the 32 franchises.
The behaviors of Americans, particularly American athletes, simply cannot be trusted.
That's why all four major sports must expand rosters far past their current plans, or risk shutting down their seasons. What's more, unless a vaccine is developed very soon, these major roster expansions will need to roll over into the 2020-21 winter seasons and likely through the beginning of baseball in 2021. Coronavirus victims can take up to six weeks to recover. The leagues are going to need lots of players in reserve.
