Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1513: Opening Day Nonstarter

Episode Date: March 13, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley react to MLB’s COVID-19-caused cancellation of the remainder of spring training and the postponement of Opening Day and discuss the disquieting week and the ramifications for the culture and the 2020 baseball season. Audio intro: Dan Bern, "Ballpark" Audio outro: Frank Sinatra, "I Get Along Without You Very Well" Link to MLB […]

Tonight I got the ballpark Tonight I got the ballpark Tonight I got the ballpark All to myself Tonight I got the ballpark Tonight I got the ballpark Tonight I got the ball, ball. Tonight I got the ball, ball. All tonight, yeah. Hello and welcome to episode 1513 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by Fangraphs and also our Patreon supporters.

I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. I'm a little discombobulated, Ben. How are you? Yeah, no wonder the thing that we talk about all the time is not happening. Man, this is grim. This is a grim bummer, a necessary bummer, but a grim bummer. Here we are, what is supposed to be two weeks out from opening day, and we are at the least delayed into the early part of april so yep so we found

out thursday afternoon not only is the rest of spring training canceled but the wbc qualifiers are canceled also the regular season the main event that is postponed at least for two weeks but really indefinitely as we see what the world looks like in two weeks. And on top of that, the minor league season, which I believe was scheduled to start on April 9th, that has also been postponed in a definite amount. And of course, this is affecting college baseball and potentially the College World Series and the draft and just baseball everywhere, because as we often talk about, baseball is part of culture and the draft and just baseball everywhere, because as we often talk about, baseball is part of culture and the entire culture just sort of stopped.

Yeah, it seems like the NCAA has decided that it will cancel the remaining winter and spring championships. And of course, the thing that people are maybe most immediately thinking of is they're canceling the men's and women's basketball tournaments and march madness but they are including in uh spring sports baseball and so the college world series is officially banged yeah so yeah it's gonna be a very bizarre it's just gonna be a bizarre year it'll be a really weird year for the draft it'll be a really weird year for baseball and the way it proceeds at both the minor league and major league level. And all of that, of course, pales in comparison to the

importance of the broader societal impact that something like this has. I don't know that I had, you know, there are a lot of things about 2020 that felt like they could be potentially bothersome and anxiety provoking. We won't name them, but they exist as things that we might have anticipated. And I don't know that a literal pandemic was on that list for me, but here we are. Pandemic. were hit earliest and hardest thus far. It was never inconceivable that this sort of thing could happen here, but there is always sort of a complacency and at least a wish casting that, well, maybe it can't happen here as the saying goes. And I suppose if you were silly enough to listen to the president, you might have thought that this might not get as serious as it has gotten elsewhere, but of course it has. And it's really sort of shocking how quickly we went from not even crossing our minds or it being conceivable that the baseball season could be postponed to it almost seeming like it was taking too long for that to happen. Yeah. and government figures were making it literally illegal to gather for a baseball game because your state and many other states were putting limits on how many people could assemble publicly, which made it impossible to play baseball under normal circumstances. And it seemed like MLB was

sort of flailing around and in a little bit of denial or just desperately looking for some alternative to doing what they did. And then I think the pressure mounted and maybe the inevitable just sort of loomed in front of them because I don't know whether the positive tests for the Utah Jazz players, that was sort of a precipitating event for the NBA. And that kind of led to a domino of other sports leagues and tournaments getting canceled. But that was really seemingly just a matter of time. So I think there was no other way to do this if they had tried to persist with some sort of plan like they were reportedly talking about, you know, playing in places that haven't yet been affected by the virus,

in places that haven't yet been affected by the virus, which it's very over-optimistic to think that there will be places that will be unaffected or that we'd be able to predict what those places would be and to play in neutral sites, just the logistical challenge. And then, of course, the idea of playing in empty ballparks, which was discussed for a while and perhaps could have been feasible, but really, ultimately, you have to protect the players too. And even though they are mostly young, strong men in baseball who are not in the highest

risk bracket, everyone is at some risk. And clearly, we saw that in basketball and would have probably seen it in baseball if they had continued on that course. And we may still see it, but I think there was no way around this as unfortunate as it is. And if anything, it took a little too long to happen given that spring training games were being played and people were showing up at those in states that were already affected by the coronavirus. Yeah. I mean, we were recording this on Thursday the 12th. I mean, there were games played today in Florida. There were games played today in Florida. They ended

up canceling most of the games in Arizona for weather reasons before they had made a determination on the sort of state of the remainder of the spring slate and the day that opening day would actually fall on but yeah like there were there were folks at the ballpark today yeah which uh always seemed like a not the best idea given that the whole way to try to stop this or minimize the effect is to keep people apart from each other yeah so it's really not something we've lived through obviously it's not really Yeah. addiction that generally doesn't end well. And hopefully this will not end in the way that that often does. But these sorts of scenes that we're seeing really does sort of remind you of that sort of story, which is scary. And unfortunately, we can't take solace in sports, which is what we

often do at times of tragedy. Yeah, I think that the way that the last couple of days have escalated have demonstrated that it is important to not be cavalier. I know that there were a couple of major leaguers who made comments that were, I think that they will look back on and probably feel badly about that, you know, your own health isn't just what you need to consider, especially if you're a young and otherwise healthy person, you will probably interact with older people or immune compromised people. And so, yeah, it was one of those tricky things because you understand you don't ever want to do this. This is like a really intense and horrible call to have to make.

And I think that baseball probably naively thought, well, we have some time, you know, opening day isn't slated till the 26th, which just always felt like a really early day and then really felt early once things started to snowball on this. But I think that we were probably a little naive to think that we were going to be able to avoid some kind of stoppage, like you said. And it's not as if the public health considerations are the only ones on the table. They're clearly the most important ones. But there are going to be ballpark concession stand workers who don't get paid for a while.

There are going to be ticket takers who don't get paid for a while. This will have a pretty profound economic impact on people and communities all across the country. But there really wasn't an alternative when you consider what needs to be done to try to contain this and not overwhelm our public health system, which, you know, noticeably late in terms of how many people were there. And I imagine that that will continue to escalate, too. So it's just going to be a scary, kind of eerie time. And people are just going to have to be as careful as they can and as disciplined about following good advice as possible. I don't know how things have been for you in New York, Ben. I know that there are a number of cases there, too.

And you're under your own sort of state of emergency. But I know in Washington that the governor's office and the local sort of public health officials here have been, they've had much more practical advice about the best way to deal with this. That's probably the politically neutral way of describing their communication relative to the president. So just listen to experts as best you can and try to be careful. And we will get baseball back eventually. But in the meantime, hopefully this keeps a couple of people from getting sick and keeps a couple more people from dying. So it's really all that matters. When we decided to cancel our Arizona meetup,

there were a couple of people. And granted, we didn't know quite as much as we do now about the seriousness of the virus. So we will give them some amount of grace and benefit of the doubt. But they're like, well, the fatality rate's just 2%. And it's like, well, and the thing at the end of that sentence is someone being dead, 2% is a lot. So let's not be cavalier and just be careful. a little easier than some of the other major sports or could potentially have it easier in that its season had not yet started. So hockey and basketball were right in the swing of things. And of course, if you're March Madness and you're a once a year thing and there's a whole logistical issue and it's something that's been planned for years, or if the Olympics are affected, for instance, those are really catastrophic.

And in baseball's case, it's impossible to predict really because what will happen with baseball depends on what will happen with COVID-19. There's no real way to tell exactly how that's going to go right now. But if things have been contained to a certain degree come a few weeks from now and baseball is able to resume, then there then they played 144 game season and it was more or less baseball as usual, apart from the fact that everyone was still upset about the strike, but it looked like baseball and felt like baseball. And no one really attaches an asterisk to that season, unless you're doing some sort of statistical analysis or something and you have to filter out strike seasons. But we are two weeks out as we speak from what would have been opening day so four weeks out from the earliest possible opening day and i would think that based on how things are going even that seems optimistic at this point but if they were to be able to resume play around that time then there is the possibility that they could still play a full season.

They'd have to extend things on the other end. They'd have to push the playoffs into November and potentially play at neutral domes or something that has been discussed. But it's really just too early to tell whether that could possibly happen. that could possibly happen. So now you just have to hope for the best and that this goes well enough that A, it's not a massive public crisis, but also much less important that there is able to be a full baseball season. I don't know how late in the year it would have to go for them to consider just scrapping it, but hopefully we don't get to that point. Yeah, hopefully we don't. But I think that we're all just going to have to, like everything else associated with this,

seemingly live with some uncertainty for the foreseeable future because I just don't know. Like you said, I don't know what the level of containment necessary is to proceed with a season that requires a bunch of people coming together, even if you're playing in front of empty ballparks. So I don't know that we're going to necessarily be super enthusiastic about the response of either the league or anyone else, but some of that is going to perhaps be a reticence to move things around that's a little stubborn. But also some of it is just going to be that we're in kind of uncharted territory here and we need to think really carefully about how to proceed. I think the international sporting world has been responsive in some ways. And we saw cancellations before, you know, MLB made its call and even before the NBA

made its, but man, it's just really hard to know exactly what to do. You know, it was tricky to know whether to do a spring training trip. It was tricky to know whether to fly because I, you know, things were, things were better a couple of days ago. So it's just a really, because it's such a fluid situation. Gosh, that's a really, we need a different word. Yeah. But I mean, I bought tickets to a concert in August earlier today. I'm going to go see Wilco and Slater Kenny, I hope, in Queens. It does sound great. But as I bought the tickets, I was like, well, I hope this happens. I hope we'll be back to a world where you can go see a concert with other people because there's just no way to tell. And as I alluded to earlier and also on the Ringer podcast, it's just especially striking maybe with baseball because baseball has so often functioned as sort of this collective way to process this sort of thing.

as sort of this collective way to process this sort of thing. And you think back to the FDR Greenlight letter during World War II and saying that he believed it was better for the country to continue playing. And that's often been the case. And you think about baseball coming back after 9-11. And the whole insidious aspect of this, apart from the sickness and the death, is just that it prevents people from congregating and coming together in a way that they typically would at a time of hardship. Usually you turn on the baseball game or you go to the baseball game, and that's the way that you distract yourself for

a few hours, hopefully. And now that outlet isn't there, and seemingly all the other outlets have been cut off. It's just very jarring to see how quickly culture has just come to a screeching halt as we all just, you know, for good reasons, decide that this is what's best for everyone. But still, in the short term, it's really actively preventing us from doing the usual thing that we do to cope with this kind of issue. Yeah, I'll be interested to see, you know, because there are going to be parts of the country where you probably still have restrictions on congregation, even if, you know, the sort of wave has crested. So we're going to continue to face thorny questions not only about whether or not we let people back into ballparks, but let's say we don't and the Mariners end up playing

to an empty T-Mobile. Well, what about people who are local who have an MLB TV subscription? Are we going to see blackouts lifted? There are all sorts of things that you just take for granted as given parameters for a baseball season. And so many of them are in question now. And like you said, like this thing that is such a profound comfort, even when it's making you mad, you know, I'm a, I'm a person who's often bothered by some aspects of baseball. It is like a really big bummer when professional athletes say abuse their spouses. And then you go to a baseball game and it's not that you forget those things, but you'd feel better. And now we can't do that. People should sign up online. They should sign up for their local public libraries because often they will have e-resources. So you could at least read a book about baseball or perhaps check out a movie about baseball to entertain yourself you should just support your local public library i don't quite know what to say ben this is a really this is probably the weirdest episode we've done

it's the first episode we've done when baseball was suspended yeah yeah, I would say so. We've imagined in the past what might happen if there were to be some sort of work stoppage. Yeah. What would we talk about? I did not expect it to be for this reason. And, yeah, I mean, not to get too cliched and corny about it, but opening day, right? It's a symbol of, like, rebirth and renewal and new life. And it's the end of the winter and it's the changing of the seasons. And it's something that you count down to, right?

I mean, people have been counting down the days literally in our Facebook group, for instance, to opening day since the last day of last season. And it's something that everyone jokingly tweets like after the last out of the world series you know 100 whatever it is days until pitchers and catchers and they're kind of kidding but also not really you do start looking forward to that day and that milestone and now it's not going to be there hopefully it will be there at some point but it is still such a literal rite of spring that it's sad to see it pushed back to any degree. And again, there are many bigger issues here, but this is a baseball podcast. And if you're listening to it, you probably care about baseball and the temporary, at least, loss of baseball is one of the things that you are mourning right now. So in addition to all of the much larger and more important issues that are out there,

I think we can still touch on this little aspect of it because this is something that affects everyone's lives, even if it's just in sort of a low-grade way, even if it's just something you put on in the background. It's the soundtrack to your day. It's something you count on being there in the background for a few hours in the evening, and it's not going to be there for a while. And a lot of the things that we're used to being there this part of it but like an odd thing about baseball being your job in addition to a thing that you like and want to engage with and want to watch is that you have to think about thorny questions like so like i had to have an opinion today about our preferred stylization of covid19 because i wanted us to be consistent and i wanted to make sure that we were being appropriately specific in our discussion of this virus because there are a lot of different coronaviruses and this is the one that's causing

a problem. So it's like, you have to think about that. You want to make sure that you're being appropriately sensitive to people's anxieties and concerns, but you still have to like run a baseball website and how do you do that? And, you know, we've figured out some adjustments to our schedule and how we're going to need to proceed so that people still have stuff to read at Fanagraphs. But it's a very – it's a profoundly strange conversation to have because you're also thinking about how when you went out to, you know, stock up and have good essentials and, you know, non-perishable food on hand. Like, they were just out of toilet paper. They were just out of toilet paper. And I ordered it on Amazon.

Now I'm going to sit here and wonder if it's actually going to come. And I hope it does because it's the thing you need. It's the thing you need. So it's just a very strange time. And I hope that we all are careful and also gracious with one another because people are going to react to this in ways that are not always graceful and sometimes will feel kind of inappropriate because anxiety and sadly for some eventually grief make us behave kind of unpredictably so it's just gonna be it's gonna be a rough time for a little while and you're right we won't have our favorite thing what perhaps what we can do for our effectively wild listeners is maybe we'll suggest some games that have been great comforts to us in the past in the Facebook group and help people kind of nail down a couple that they might watch if they are in need of a distraction so they're not just sitting and watching cable news all afternoon waiting for the latest bad bit of business. Maybe that would be good.

Yeah, we'll have to think of some ways to get through this time on the podcast which we will keep bringing you. At least that will not go away as long as it's in our power. And we are probably going to be suspending our season preview series along with the suspension to the season because there's no

actual season yet to preview. So we only have four more of those episodes left and eight teams, I believe, but most likely we will wait and see and resume that when we get a little closer to whenever opening day will be. But there are a lot of questions that I'm sure we will have time to talk about in the next couple of weeks, but there are just so many ramifications of this on a baseball level that I'm probably not even thinking of yet. But if the college season is wiped out, what does that do to the draft?

What does that do to senior sign type people? Do they get their eligibility back or something? Do they have more leverage? And in terms of pay, that's going to be an issue because with fewer games played, if there do end up being fewer than 162 games, does that mean that owners will try to pay the players less? Will they accept that financial hit themselves? It seems like there's already been some discussion about that and players believe that they should be paid and owners may try to say, well, it's a virus. It's out of our

control. It's not something that we should shoulder the load for. So given that the CBA negotiations are coming up and there are already underlying issues about baseball economics, you wonder whether that comes to a head at a certain point. And then there's the question about minor leaguers who don't get paid for this time and don't get paid enough as it is. And you mentioned the game day employees. I believe Kevin Love, the basketball player, already donated $100,000 to the Cleveland game day employees, which is nice. And we'll see whether some baseball players follow suit. But that has an impact on the spring training economy. And then what do the players do now? And that stuff is sort of starting to trickle out of camps that it seems like, based on what we've seen so far, and obviously this is all subject to change and may well have changed by the time you hear this, but sounds like teams are inclined to keep their camps open to players and their training facilities. And not all players may choose to remain.

Of course, they may feel safer elsewhere, want to be with their families somewhere else. But that's the question, too. How well can you prepare for the season if you can't play games? And, you know, if the team is there, if the facilities are open, then you can keep training. You can keep throwing. Perhaps you can even scrimmage or throw sim games or that sort of thing, as long as it's deemed safe for the players to be around each other, which may not continue to be the case. But whenever the all clear is eventually hopefully sounded, it will take some amount of time for players who were not quite up

to speed yet to get up to speed. And so we may see another mini spring training and then the question will be, well, how long will that take? Right. This is the thing. It's like there is the timeline that is the diseases timeline. And we obviously have very little control over that. But then there's also just a baseball timeline that at a certain point, we will have been delayed enough that guys will need to start building back up in order to be ready, especially if you're right to say that right now it seems like folks are going to stay close to their spring training complexes, but people are going to start to feel more afraid. They're going to want to be close to their families if something bad or catastrophic happens. So who knows how long they're going to stay there

and focused on baseball activities. I imagine that at a certain point, it's going to feel, you know, very trivial to them compared to what else is going on in the world. So even if the disease timeline resolves in a way that facilitates play, we might have to contend then with the realities of a baseball timeline and the timelines of baseball bodies and how they need to ramp up and adjust. And so there's just going to be a lot that is uncertain based on, you know, there's so much precision that goes into how guys prepare for the season. We hear so much about their, you know, spring routines and their off-season routines and how they like to sequence things and the optimal amount of rest.

And all of that stuff is going to get disrupted now. So it's just very, very difficult to peg exactly where we're going to fall. And, you know, will that first month of the season look like normal baseball? Are you going to have guys surprisingly unavailable because they need more time to throw? Are you going to have guys who are unavailable because they're sick? You know, this disease does not discriminate, even if, you know, there are certainly greater risks associated with people who don't have access to good health care. So there are going to be guys who get sick. Like there's already been linkage between that utah jazz team and the mets so it's just uh yeah you're just like we all know the joke you guys we don't have to make it we don't have to make the mets

joke this is serious but so it's just it's really hard to know on any given day you know when we woke up this morning there was still spring training. And now there's not. Who knows what will happen? It's only it's only 330 in the West. Right. Yeah. I just saw a tweet that the governor of Illinois announced that he asked all the owners of Illinois sports franchises to cancel their events or at least play them without spectators through the end of April.

or at least play them without spectators through the end of April. And he said that they all agreed to comply with that, which would mean that there will be no baseball with fans, at least through the end of that month in Chicago. And, you know, we may see games played without fans like we did in Baltimore that one time. And it was weird. And I think there is something lost when you don't have that in-person communal experience but I think it can still be a communal experience for everyone who is following along at home and on Twitter and still getting the the distraction and comfort that comes from that so I would be

in favor of playing games with no fans if that meant that the baseball season could start sooner and if it didn't place the players in any undue danger. So that may be something that we see. And there may be interesting analytical conundrums that come out of all of this when it comes to park factors or home field advantage. There may be certain things that we learn from this, which, you know, doesn't really matter compared to anything else. But that may be something that we talk about in a future episode because I know we've already gotten some emails from listeners about it. But, you know, it's going to be strange and we will just roll with the punches as best we can here on this podcast. And we encourage everyone, if you are a Facebook person, there's a lively group in there that I think sort of functions as a support group for people sometimes. And especially now when we may not be having as

much human contact as we are used to, you can join the Effectively Wild Facebook group if you'd like, and we will keep talking about stuff. But yeah, it'll be fascinating to see because, you know, I do sort of think that spring training is longer than it needs to be in this era. I don't particularly care that it's maybe longer than it has to be. now and stay in pretty good shape year round and often train at their own facilities over the offseason. But if you told them it will show up in March, you know, pitchers and catchers report on March 1st now or something, they'd be fine for the most part. I think they could still get ready for the season, but that's if you told them that and if they built their throwing programs around that expectation and everything and they came in knowing that ahead of time. And so if you try to rush things, then you're risking potential injuries. And if the whole league is a little bit behind its usual speed,

then maybe that's not as big a problem as, say, one person who misses spring training while everyone else had spring training. And then that guy's trying to catch up to everyone else. If everyone is a little bit slow or something, I guess that could affect the quality of play. Right. guys are still going four innings instead of six or something. I guess just in the interest of getting games going, as long as it's affecting everyone equally, that's something you could potentially see. So I don't know. It'll be something that we have not seen.

Even in 1918, when there was an extremely deadly influenza, the baseball season had actually ended early before the worst of that hit here because of World War I. So the baseball season ended in early September and was sort of spared the worst of that, although there were players and baseball people who were claimed by that virus. But we just haven't really seen this. This is unprecedented, certainly for the reason, and depending on how long this postponement stretches, it This is unprecedented, certainly for the reason. And depending on how long this postponement stretches, it could be unprecedented period, but hopefully there will

be baseball. Hopefully there will be baseball. Everyone wash your hands. It doesn't have to be hand soap. You're going to go to your local supermarket or Walgreens or what have you, and all the hand soap is going to be bought out, but there's going to be dish soap and that works just as well. So don't skimp on washing your hands just because there's no hand soap. Wash your hands, cough into your elbows and practice social distancing. You will never feel bad about not getting your grandparents sick. You'll always feel good about not contributing to that. So good choices take care of each other, be careful listen to experts, listen only to experts and we'll see what baseball does

and we'll be here to try to help guide people through it and hopefully by the time this podcast goes up I will have figured out how to say complete sentences and the words I mean and sound a little less frazzled and then we'll pick up where we need to with the new set of horrors tomorrow. And in fact, we have already

recorded the next episode, which we were planning to record next. And we decided to cut in and record a coronavirus episode. Seemed somewhat pressing that the baseball season was suspended. Seemed to deserve a standalone episode, but we will post the one that's already in the can shortly after this. And I think it will give people a few suggestions for how to pass their time in the next few weeks in a baseball-related way without baseball. So we will be back to talk to you all soon. So stay safe and do whatever you can to keep safe. See you later, Ben. All right.

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We've been talking about baseball without actual baseball being on for months now. So what's a few more weeks? Let's hope. Talk to you soon. Very well, of course I do Except perhaps in spring But I should never think of spring For that would surely break my heart in two