Play Ball? Not yet.
Someone connected to Major League Baseball leaked word of a plan that would enable the business to reopen. The initiative, if executed, would usher in a sense of normalcy as daily routines would return despite the fact that the coronavirus is not going anywhere anytime soon. The notion has the 30 teams reporting to the Phoenix metropolitan area sometime in May, having an abbreviated training period. Teams would use the spring training facilities, which would be devoid of customers in the stands, in greater Phoenix area to play the 2020 regular season. That was the plan but there has to be more. Players safety, you cannot protect the players from getting COVID-19 until there is a vaccine or a reliable drug or drug cocktail to cure the virus. How do you isolate the more than a thousand people connected to Major League Baseball and at what health cost? Baseball personnel still have to eat somewhere. They have to travel to the parks and there has been grocery store workers and bus drivers who have died from the coronavirus. Would the baseball personnel families join them? Another problem, why should baseball personnel get constant COVID-19 testing when most of the American public can’t? MLB has backed off from initial ESPN reporting of the plan.
According to MLB, it did “not sought or received approval of any plan from federal, state and local officials or the Players Association” in developing the Arizona baseball concept. There are some in the baseball reporting community who welcomed the Arizona plan because it is good for the country and pointed out that in 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt told Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis that baseball should play ball for the Yankee Doodle de dum spirit of a country that was involved in World War II. Roosevelt saw baseball as a diversion not a health threat.
