TAMPA — J.A. Happ, lucky man, went to bed Wednesday night none the wiser and didn’t know of coronavirus’ latest attack on normalcy until Thursday morning.
“At about 6:30, I woke up and checked my phone and saw the news,” the Yankees veteran recounted, referring to the NBA’s suspension of its season, at George M. Steinbrenner Field.
Maybe the same thing happened to Rob Manfred. That would explain why six games, with paying crowds, took place Thursday afternoon in Florida before Major League Baseball finally caught up and got real. The league proceeded in canceling the seven games in Arizona as well as an Orioles-Twins night game in Fort Myers, Fla., suspending the rest of spring training and delaying the start of the regular season by at least two weeks.
Clearly the NBA’s aggressive maneuver caught the rest of the sports leagues by surprise, and MLB faced the least reaction time given the starting time of the Grapefruit League afternoon contests. If it doesn’t excuse Manfred’s slow trigger finger — why not cancel all of Thursday’s action at the crack of dawn, then take the rest of the day to figure out everything else? — it at least offers context.
Alas, moving forward, context will be sparse for Major League Baseball. It owns a richer and longer history than any of its competitors, yet can’t pull up any historical comparables for what awaits the game as we wait for games to return.
“We all have some anxieties about this. We’re all worried about this. For the health and safety of our families,” Gerrit Cole said before the news broke (although it was expected). “As far as our job goes, we’ve been told nothing other than to get prepared. That’s kind of all we can do.”
Added Brett Gardner: “We’ll continue to get our work in and whenever the season starts, wherever it starts, we’ll be ready.”
With the Yankees playing the Nationals across the state in West Palm Beach, the veterans who avoided that trek normally would be ultra-relaxed: Show up at the ballpark in the morning and do a couple of hours of work, then enjoy the rest of the day. This day lacked that easiness, as everyone braced for the bombshell to come.
It’s the uncertainty and the lack of agency that has paralyzed folks in the sports world, right?
A labor stoppage, the most common cause of curtailed seasons in baseball especially, comes with control of the situation. The 1918 MLB season ended a month early thanks to World War I, a conscious and conscientious decision made by the folks back then with a clear endpoint. And after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Bud Selig rightly halted action for six days, giving the country a little time to grieve and breathe.
This break, which almost certainly will surpass the two-week declaration? Its length stands as indeterminate, its fate in the hands of doctors and politicians. Teams will work in limbo at their spring-training complexes, essentially walking a treadmill until the smoke clears.
It’s insane, in the non-medical sense of the word, and a shame on anyone who opines that this “puts in perspective” the Astros sign-stealing scandal, as nearly all of us already viewed that hilarious saga in its proper perspective before we became familiar with COVID-19.
If we learned anything from this winter’s succession of huge stories, it’s that the madcap proves no challenge against the terrifying.
Zack Britton, the Yankees’ player representative, said Thursday morning, “We’re all just trying to wrap our heads around, what’s the best course of action going forward for Major League Baseball?”
By day’s end, they had chosen the best course of action. Whether we’ll ever wrap our heads around this stunning development, though, we won’t know that for a while.
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March 13, 2020 at 10:16AM
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MLB's coronavirus actions didn't come quickly enough - New York Post
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