Today, Explained - The return of sports

Episode Date: June 17, 2020

There are two ways to do it: safely or not so safely. Guess which one we’re heading toward in the United States? Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Today, today exclaims. Remember the day sports died? As due to unforeseen circumstances, the game tonight has been postponed. You are all safe. This was at an NBA game in March. A Utah Jazz player tested positive for the coronavirus, threw the entire sports world into chaos. Now it's almost July, and this week ESPN had a big symposium with a bunch of league commissioners about the return of sports. They called it the return of sports. It has now been more than three months that these seats have been empty, that these buildings have been startlingly quiet since our world of sports has been on hold.

But now it would appear that the time has come for the return of sports. Today on the show, we're going to try and figure out how sports can come back. And we're going to do that with Today Explained sports correspondent Noam Hassenfeld. Noam, how are sports coming back? You've been tracking this. Yeah, so all the major leagues in America are trying to come back. Major League Baseball is having this long, frustrating labor dispute, but it looks like basketball, soccer, and hockey are going to come back this summer.

And how are they doing it? Do they have a solid plan? Sort of. There's two basic ways that you can start playing sports during a pandemic. Option one, you do everything to manage the pandemic and then you think about sports. Oh, I like option one. Or option two, you can totally mismanage the pandemic and then push ahead with sports anyway. That sounds like something we would do. Which is which? Who's doing which? So option one is South Korea. South Korea's got the Baseball League, yeah? Yeah, the KBO, the Korea Baseball Organization.

They've been playing since early May, and they've actually been broadcast on ESPN here in the States. What's option two? Option two is America. I knew it. So I'm going to take you through both options in this episode, and we're going to start with option one, South Korea. Their plan started with testing. If anybody has any symptoms, they could get tested quite easily and then get the results

back within 24 hours. Jiho Yoo is a sports writer for Yonhap News in Seoul. In one of the ballparks in Seoul, there's literally a testing station right next to a baseball stadium. And it's not just easy for baseball players. South Korea did widespread testing, contact tracing, quarantines, and it dramatically slowed the spread of the virus. Then, in order to restart sports, the KBO put tough restrictions on its players. They were asked to download this particular app on their phones to report their temperatures every day. They are taking their temperatures constantly. When they get up in the morning and then before they get on the bus to get to the stadium.

And then when they come in, they also have their temperature checked. And the KBO has made some on-field changes too. No high fives with bare hands, no spitting. First base and third base coaches, umpires, have to keep their masks on the whole game. But maybe the biggest change is in the stands. Or who isn't in the stands. No fans allowed.

This would be a dramatic change for any league, but it's enormous for the KBO. The KBO fan experience is vastly different than MLB fan experience. I'll see ya! You'll see ya! Yeah! The KBO fan experience is vastly different than MLB fan experience. You know, literally from first pitch to final out, cheering. Every team has a cheerleading squad, you know, set up on the stage, either first base or third base side. And at the center of these squads is the cheer master. Every team has one. Plus four or five handful of cheerleaders standing up for the whole inning, banging like thundersticks.

And then there are the personalized songs. Every player has a song. Popular guys, you know, fans memorize the words. It's pretty electric. Going to a KBO game, you know, that's a great excuse to get drunk outdoors. I would think even casual fans would come to KBO games, not necessarily to watch baseball, but just have a couple of beers and enjoy the sort of being in the crowd. I think even casual fans would come to KBO games, not necessarily to watch baseball, but just have a couple of beers and enjoy the sort of being in the crowd.

I think, you know, people watching on ESPN right now in the US, they're really missing out on the fan atmosphere in the KBL. It's a different game when the fans are there in full volume. It's nothing like what you've seen in Major League Baseball. Take away those fans, and the games start to sound pretty different.

It's super weird, especially in this league, because the fans make the environment so energetic and so much fun. Casey Kelly. Starting pitcher for the LG Twins of the KBO. Casey played here in the U.S. for the Padres, Braves, and Giants, and then he moved to the KBO last year.

When the fans are going on and they're doing their chants, it makes it easier to focus but with no sound, you kind of feel like it's not a real game. You can hear everything you know you can hear the dugout saying stuff you can hear the fielder saying stuff. I think the players have been trying to kind of tone down their trash talking just because it might get picked up on TV. I'm just thankful that I don't know the language enough to really hear if they're talking trash to me.

I don't think I'll ever get used to it. It's very bizarre. The great part about last year was, you know, if you're feeling tired or feeling, you know, like you didn't have your best stuff, the fans would give you energy and make you get some confidence in yourself. But the fans make the atmosphere what it is, and not having them is really tough.

The new KBO season has been underway for over a month now, but it hasn't been all smooth sailing. Just before the preseason began, when teams were practicing, some teams had players show some fever, and they had to drop everything. They had to stop, get their player tested, and everybody had to go home and quarantine until the result came back.

The league took these tests seriously. But so far, we haven't had anybody test positive yet. And the league's shown it can adjust its plan on the fly. They'd hoped to have some fans back at games by now, but last month, they had to make a change. There was a sudden spike in COVID-19 cases, and that has been linked to some nightclubs in a sort of nightlife district in Seoul. It's threatened to go out of control for a bit. So the KBO extended the ban on fans.

But still, the KBO model is drawing a lot of interest here in the U.S. I do know for a fact that MLB is looking at KBO and how KBO was able to begin its season when it did. But I just think that, you know, looking at two different situations with the response to COVID-19. So I don't know if these rules and measures and restrictions, if you will, that are working in KBO,

I don't know if they're going to necessarily work in the U.S. Ultimately, they have got a lot more hurdles to overcome just to get the season started right now. So now that we have option one out of the way, South Korea's way, manage the pandemic, then bring sports back,

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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Today Explained, we're talking about how to bring back sports during COVID. We covered the Korean way, aka option one, which sounds simple. Handle the pandemic, then slowly bring sports back. Noam, what's option two? What's going on with the United States? Yeah, the United States obviously hasn't done a good job with the pandemic, and it's making it a lot more difficult to bring sports back.

Leagues that went on hiatus during the middle of the season, they looked around and saw that the pandemic wasn't going anywhere. So they started considering some pretty bonkers ideas. The NBA is considering, you'll love this, a Disney World plan as a possible location to stage the completion of its season. The NBA wanted to send the entire league to Disney World to finish the basketball season in a sort of COVID-free bubble. And somehow, this idea actually started catching on.

That made so much sense to me because you have the hotels, you have all of the infrastructure already in place, you have the ability to control your environment in the world that appears to be the greatest controlled environment in the history of controlled environments. A controlled environment would be essential for the bubble plan because COVID cases are still very much on the rise in the U.S., including right outside Disney World. Much has been made of the fact that Orange County, Florida and Osceola County, Florida are trending the wrong way right now. But with the bubble concept, you get to open now anyway. Henry Abbott is a basketball reporter and the founder of True Hoop. If you want to do business without requiring the surrounding community to be at a minimum risk, right,

then you have to have a bubble. Owners signed off, the players union signed off, and now it's official. The NBA is going to Disney World. At the end of July, 22 teams will be going to Disney World. They'll take up residence in ESPN's Wide World of Sports. And they'll play eight games to finish the regular season and then the full playoffs as if there had been no coronavirus. That's the world the NBA is trying to create inside this Disney bubble. A magical land where there's no pandemic.

For the teams, this starts at home. They'll be somewhat quarantined and then the team will fly together. A magical land where there's no pandemic. For the teams, this starts at home. They'll be somewhat quarantined, and then the team will fly together. They'll enter the Disney bubble at a specific time unique to that team. And then all go to their rooms for 36 hours, during which they're getting tested, and then kind of emerge and begin practicing and moving around within the bubble. There'll be movie screenings, DJ sets, video games, ping pong, pool. And they'll play all of the games nearby. But without fans.

And for now, players' families have to stay home. But there'll still be a ton of people there. There's going to be around a thousand people, if not more, in the bubble. Because it's not just players in this COVID-free utopia. Players are a few hundred people, and journalists, broadcasters, coaches, support staff, bus drivers, etc. It's a true magic kingdom. Except the bubble itself isn't exactly secure. It doesn't sound like it'll be particularly rigid, this bubble.

It sounds like there will be food deliveries and plumbers and everything you need to support that many people. And those people are going to be going in and out of the bubble. So there'll be Disney employees, for instance, in the kitchen or cleaning rooms, and they likely will not get tested for the coronavirus every day, but they will have temperature checks. And even if they have 100.3 temperature, they can just go to work. That leaves a lot of openings for the virus to get in. So the league is going to do a lot of testing. Not including those Disney employees going in and out, the NBA says everyone in the league is going to do a lot of testing. Not including those Disney employees going in and out,

the NBA says everyone in the bubble is going to be tested regularly, which could mean every day or it could mean less. That's still a thousand or more people that need to be regularly tested. For basketball, it's a tremendous number of tests. On otherwise healthy people. Which is in keeping with

no government recommendation right now. If a player tests positive, they'll be quarantined, there will be contact tracing, but there are still a lot of difficult decisions to be made. Will the whole team be quarantined? Would the entire league be placed on pause? That's what the KBO can do in South Korea, but the NBA won't do the same. According to a report leaked Tuesday, the NBA says that the occurrence of a small or otherwise expected number of COVID-19 cases will not require a decision to suspend or cancel the resumption

of the 2019-20 season, which means there could be some positive cases and they'll keep playing. Ultimately, the plan still leaves a lot of questions unanswered. I was hoping when this whole thing started, it would be a chance for America to have like a microcosm of Korea or somewhere where this was well managed. But everyone's a little concerned. So how concerned should we be? Well, I mean, I think when we're thinking about a bubble, it sounds really great up front. But then the devil's in the detail. Dr. Tara Crooksell is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

So basketball is indoor. And also the contact is just intense. Like, you know, people are guarding each other, they're breathing on each other's faces. There's much more contact and possibility for you to breathe in the respiratory droplets that might be infectious in basketball as compared to baseball. Which means the NBA needs to be prepared. I don't see any way that you're going to not see positive tests. The real question is, how do we deal with them in a way that's responsible

and allows play to go on? The NBA has contact tracing protocols, but they may not be aggressive enough. What happens with the team? What happens with everyone they played against? We need to test immediately. We need to be really aggressive about that. And the NBA can't just rely on testing. We need to be really aggressive about that.

And the NBA can't just rely on testing. I think a lot of people expect that when you take a test, it either shows you a true result, yes or no. And we know that there can be a lot of false positives and false negatives. Meaning that a player who follows all the rules could test negative and still easily transmit the virus on the court. You know, hopefully you would catch the next time you test the person, but you'd still have a delay in getting on top of that potential outbreak. It's unlikely, but when you're talking about a thousand people getting regularly tested,

small percentages loom much larger. You know, things are going to go wrong. We need to know how it's going to be dealt with. I think that would help the players understand and be more confident as well. To be fair, the NBA is taking a lot of precautions here. It just comes down to how much risk we want to accept. You know, as we open things back up, we add a little more risk, right?

Opening up schools or allowing a little more business activity, allowing surgeries. You know, all these things add to our risk of increased transmission. And so I think we have to sort of prioritize what we think is most important. Many Americans want to prioritize sports. We want to get our country open again. We want to have our sports leagues open.

You want to watch sports. It's important. We miss sports. And wanting sports back, it's understandable. I think sports really would provide a lot of comfort. You know, the question is, is it worth it? I don't feel like we have the data. Henry Abbott again.

This feels to me like at some point they just want to go. But the greatest risk might actually not be for the players. It might be for everyone watching. Once you start doing things that are globally televised, you kind of end up on one side of that debate, no matter what your views are. More leagues will likely follow the NBA here, and there's no telling whether they'll be nearly as cautious. You can't very well open the league and then say, yeah, I'm not really sure it's safe. I'm not sure we're ready to go back to work,

like you already have an implied side on, like, should my brother-in-law go back to the office in Manhattan? Sports can serve as a role model, and watching sports, viewers might feel like things are getting back to normal. But sports are not a precursor of a normal society, right? Like, they're a byproduct of it. You don't get to just sort of, like, trot sports out there as an experiment to see if you can create normal society, right? You have to have normal society working, and then you get to have sports.

When sports ground to a halt, it was the moment many Americans realized the world wouldn't be normal for a long time. And to be honest, I really miss it. I miss watching basketball, reading recaps, texting with my friends about last night's game. But the death toll from COVID-19 continues to rise, and America continues to open back up. So maybe we still need that reminder.

Things aren't normal. Today explains sports correspondent Noam Hassenfeld. Noam wears a lot of hats at the show. He's also working on our summer camp episodes for kids this summer. And we have yet another question. We want to know what your kids want to know about COVID-19 now that we're months and months into this pandemic. We'd especially love to get some science-based questions. So if the kids in your life are wondering

how treatments or vaccines work, ask away, record a voice memo, and email it to us todayexplainedatvox.com, or your kids can call and leave a message at 202-688-5944. Again, that's 202-688-5944 I'm Sean Ramos from the rest of the team is Afim Shapiro

Muj Zaydi, Jillian Weinberger Bridget McCarthy, Amina Alsadi and Halima Shah, the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder handles the music Cecilia Lay handles the facts and Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's editorial director of podcasts special thanks this week to Soon and Hannah Choi and Spencer Lenfield.

They helped with the translations in today's episode transcript. You can find that at vox.com slash today explained.