Major League Baseball: Postpone Opening Day
The novel coronavirus COVID-19 continues to spread in the United States and more and more institutions are taking precautionary measures to avoid a more serious outbreak. Meanwhile, the only changes Major League Baseball has made to date are to discourage players from signing autographs and to close its clubhouses to reporters to limit interactions. With Opening Day just a couple weeks away, it’s past time for MLB to put the health and safety of its fans ahead of its profits and postpone Opening Day.
On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the league was considering moving games to areas where there have been no confirmed cases of the virus yet. Just hours later, the World Health Organization officially classified this outbreak as a pandemic. MLB needs to understand — this isn’t some isolated event, like a hurricane, for which they have moved individual games. It’s an especially naive view of the crisis, considering how many potentially exposed Americans have not yet been able to get tested. It requires a league-wide mandate.
On Tuesday, the university where I teach announced it is joining the growing number of schools closing its campus and moving to online-only classes for the near-term. Like professional sporting events, this will require major efforts from many parties to effectively manage, catering to the needs of students, workers and faculty alike. But even as education is far more important than professional sporting events, organizations increasingly are understanding the caution required to stem the spread of the virus.
That’s not to say that other sports organizations haven’t already put safety ahead of profits. Earlier this week, Italy put its entire sports calendar on hold. But you don’t even need to look to other sports for precedent.
On Monday, both Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball and the Korea Baseball Organization announced they were pushing back their respective Opening Days. Those are the second- and third-largest professional baseball leagues in the world, with some NPB teams averaging more than 40,000 fans per game.
The short notice shouldn’t be prohibitive for MLB, either. Here in the U.S., we’ve already seen the BNP Paribas Open — the largest tournament on the pro tennis circuit outside the grand slams — postponed just a couple days before it was scheduled to start. The NCAA announced Wednesday that it would close its marquee event, the men’s basketball tournament, to all but essential personnel and families, less than a week before the first games.
Finally, on Wednesday night, the NBA postponed its season. It did so only after Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19 not 48 hours after he finished a press conference in which he joked about getting the viru by intentionally touching every microphone in front of him.
On a larger scale, MLB has been through this all relatively recently as well. After 9/11, air traffic was grounded and the nation’s sports schedule was put on indefinite hold, eventually resuming Sept. 17. The missed games were tacked onto the end of the regular season. While that may not be entirely practical, depending on how long the season is postponed, losing a few home dates is surely worth the cost of quelling a pandemic.
Almost no teams sell out every game anyway, so issuing open rain checks to fans for any canceled games for the remaining games on the schedule might actually boost the league’s continually declining attendance numbers.
I understand well that it is an enormous pain to do this. As a former employee of four different professional baseball organizations, I know that each and every gameday is a major production and that even a single rainout is an upheaval on everyone’s schedule. But the sooner the decision is made before March 26, when the regular season is set to begin, the easier that process will be.
I’m also not blind to the fact that missing openings would hurt the thousands of part-time workers that make the show run every night. Given MLB’s massive profits, teams should find space in their budgets to pay for the nights those workers might miss. Mark Cuban has already said he’s looking into this for the Dallas Mavericks, and other NBA teams would be wise to follow suit.
It would be wildly irresponsible to encourage 40,000-plus people each in major urban areas to come together to share high-fives, condiment stations, handrails, bathrooms and tight seats next to total strangers for several hours. Attending a Major League Baseball game is, in nearly every way, the very opposite of social distancing.
Some games are already in jeopardy. Washington State’s new measures have put the Seattle Mariners in limbo, while California’s actions could impact any or all of the five teams that call the state home. More cities are sure to follow.
Here in Washington, the city has recommended against gatherings of more than 1,000 people, a guideline the Washington Wizards and Washington Capitals were already ignoring before the NBA’s announcement Wednesday evening. With the Washington Nationals coming off the franchise’s first World Series victory, Opening Day promises to be an event for the ages. In a town that cherishes such high profile celebrations, how many people in a stadium of more than 40,000 people would be willing to ignore their flu-like symptoms to see the banner unfold? Ten? A hundred? A thousand?
Major League Baseball has put its own profits before the regards of its fans for years. Pushing Opening Day won’t fix that. But not doing so will be the ultimate slap in the face to those who support the game the most and could put many more people in danger.
