Baseball's hiatus is necessary in scary and uncertain times
Tyler Wade, left, and Clint Frazier of the Yankees head to the clubhouse against the Washington Nationals Thursday. Credit: Getty Images/Michael Reaves
FORT MYERS, Fla.
For everything we love about baseball, one of the most comforting things is the schedule.
Each date is fondly circled on the calendar. Pitchers and catchers. Position players. The Grapefruit League openers. We know way ahead of time when Jacob deGrom or Noah Syndergaard or Gerrit Cole or Masahiro Tanaka is penciled in to pitch.
Opening Day is the most sacred of sports holidays. Just thinking about it keeps us warm through the winter months. As cold and gray and wet and frozen as life gets, there is always Opening Day to look forward to.
They’re the two most hopeful words in the language of sports.
But not anymore.
We assume there will be an Opening Day. That’s the plan. But in order to combat the rising coronavirus threat, Major League Baseball did what it had to do Thursday by suspending the remainder of the spring training schedule and delaying the start of the regular season for a minimum of two weeks.
It was the only action MLB could take and came on the heels of every other pro sports league, as well as the NCAA, either postponing games or canceling tournaments altogether.
This is uncharted territory and the coronavirus is a danger without fully defined parameters. The most immediate way to battle it at this stage (fingers crossed) is to first try for containment.
“MLB and the Clubs have been preparing a variety of contingency plans regarding the 2020 regular season schedule,” MLB said in a statement. “MLB will announce the effects on the schedule at an appropriate time and will remain flexible as events warrant, with the hope of resuming normal operations as soon as possible.”
Normal. That feels like a million miles away at the moment. And for baseball, the mere mention of April 9 as the next possible Opening Day — a new date to circle — seems to be a fantasy. As much as we want to, it doesn’t feel like a real, tangible thing to embrace. How can we?
The fact is, nobody has any idea, MLB or otherwise, what we’re dealing with yet. In one 24-hour span, the sports landscape changed more than a dozen times, and it flipped over entirely when two Utah Jazz players — Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell — became the first U.S. pro athletes to test positive for the coronavirus.
Just to show how far the tentacles of this virus can reach, and how quickly, Mitchell is the son of a Mets front-office employee, Donovan Mitchell Sr., who then had to undergo testing himself, according to the team. As of Thursday evening, the Mets were waiting for those results, and the implications are potentially devastating. Mitchell, a regular clubhouse presence, saw his son play the Knicks at Madison Square Garden on March 4, then returned to Port St. Lucie for his work duties.
That’s how quickly things turn these days. And why MLB and the rest of us have to be prepared for anything, in every aspect of our lives.
While the aftermath of Sept. 11 seems to be the most appropriate comp, considering that baseball also screeched to a halt on that horrible date, we felt that bringing the sport back — especially in New York — served as an integral component to the city’s emotional and spiritual rebuilding process.
This seems a little harder to define, and we’re not sure of the damage yet or the duration of the attack.
Mike Piazza delivered his iconic home run at Shea Stadium on Sept. 21, only 10 days after the Twin Towers came crashing down, changing the world forever. At this point, as our nation plots a strategy to slow the coronavirus and New York finds itself on the brink of a total shutdown, the most optimistic estimate for our sporting rebirth is clocking in at a month.
But we just don’t know, and that’s the hardest part. This is an unprecedented global health crisis, and baseball, like every other sport, is so far off the radar right now that we should consider ourselves lucky if it is back in only a month.
“First and foremost, I want to say I’m going to miss baseball,” Pete Alonso wrote on his social media accounts. “God willing, it will only be a short hiatus from the best game in the world. It’s a strange circumstance in a strange world. I hope everyone stays healthy and safe.
“For the people who are affected by this virus, I wish them a speedy recovery. The best things in life [baseball season] are worth waiting for.”
And so we wait. A month is going to seem like an eternity after being patient through another winter, particularly after making it to the stretch run of spring training. But the feeling here is that we’ll wait longer than that, because coming back too soon would be a catastrophe.
This Opening Day needs to stick. With all the uncertainty ahead, and likely hardship, we’re desperately looking forward to it again. Whenever that may be.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
