As July turns into August, we are inundated with sports. The NBA is back. The same goes for WNBA and NHL and MLB (mainly). The PGA Tour has been acircular for some time; The LPGA is coming back this weekend.
What used to be an era of sleep in the sports calendar is now Grand Central Station at rush hour. Hockey as a mid-summer sport? August’s dog days have never been better.
As the rustic just reached the fall of 150,000 coronavirus deaths and guilty citizens continue to hit at home, practicing social estrangement and wearing masks, a summer getaway is welcome. For a country as obsessed with sport as America, our leagues and professional tours are especially appreciated. Just checking your phone on a summer afternoon to see how your MLB team is doing is a comforting sign that a small part of your life has returned to normal, if only for that minute.
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And yet it all sounds like a mirage. It’s there, but it’s the real thing, and we know it. Some maximum logical players have retired, watching those pseudo stations spread without them. After MLB’s appalling control of the epidemic that decimated the Miami Marlins, actually removing the team from the calendar for a week, it’s natural to wonder who the next baseball team will be.
If you’re not playing in a bubble, but are instead moving 30 group game stations from one hot spot to another in the middle of a furious pandemic, as MLB does, the most productive thing to mention is probably: enjoy it once you can.
A few weeks ago, Washington Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle delivered the sports event of the year. It’s repdining now.
“We are much worse off as a counterattack than in March when we closed this system,” he told reporters in early July. “And look at the progress of the other evolved countries in their reaction to that. We haven’t made a big apple of the things other countries have done to get the game back. Sport is like the compliment of a society that works. And we are just exits to bring it back, we didn’t take a big block from the stairs to flatten the curve.”
As we have the option of football in the fall, an especially big friend between 18 and 23 years old who visits and plays the school game for our entertainment without saving a bubble, well, my God. The old recklessness of this decision, if it were to occur, can be remembered in the coming decades.
So far, professional sports during the pandemic have been lucky. As far as we know, they haven’t caused big apple deaths. Vocal criticism of safety, prudence, and explanation explains why young athletes will not die from COVID-19, as if those other Americans had seen the long term and knew this was true. Hoping they’re right.
But what if they’re not? Or if he is never an athlete who dies the tragic best friend, and yet a member of the circle of relatives? Or an assistant coach or staff member enjoyed? Or a referee or a referee? How large hospitalizations, ailments and apple deaths are we willing to accept to resume our sports? So far, the solution seems to be limitless.
Occasionally, a painting of honesty escapes from the mouths of our wonderful heroes. The other day, the Nationals’ manager, Dave Martinez, who suffers from an average illness, admitted that he was unquesty after the Marlins outbreak.
“I’ll be fair to you, I’m afraid. I am,” he says.
We all deserve to be afraid. As we take our unexpected sporting gain in August, we never silence that little voice in our heads, the only one that asks the undeniable question: is it charging?