The 4 Major Sports And Their Covid Plans
The country is officially starting to open back up! Right on time for another wave of Corona because we didn’t spend any of that downtime building infrastructure to deal with the virus that caused the shutdowns to begin with! Yay America! Let’s run up the score on all those other countries with fewer deaths. In the meantime, while we burn, the big sports leagues are starting to try and figure out how to make this work. From what I can tell, Baseball seems to be the one fucking it up the hardest.
Football is set for the moment. Corona hit at the perfect time for football season to survive. At this rate though there seems like a decent chance we will not be through the woods by the time the season actually begins. I wager that right now the head honchos at the NFL are paying extremely close attention to whatever the MLB does, as they’ll soon be in a similar position of having to start a season during the pandemic.
The NBA has decided to give 22 teams (every one that still had playoff hope) a chance to duke it out in a contained tournament in Orlando. It seems like the players union and the league is moving forward with this plan. Apparently they will not stop play if an infection is found in a single player, but beyond that things may change. The season should be over by early Oct, which I presume means the next season will be delayed. More info here.
The NHL is moving ahead with a similar idea, going straight into the playoffs with an altered format. More info here.
Then we have Baseball. Baseball is really fucking it up. Baseball had a chance to be the first sport to return: they failed. They promised there would be a 2020 season…now that is in jeopardy. The owners are trying to screw the players and being very cheap about the whole thing. Rob Manfred, the current commish, seems like a big ol’ dumbass that nobody likes. I don’t venture much into baseball world but judging from his pathetic Astros punishment and now this latest debacle, he might be the worst commish of the big 4? The entire league seems like a mess who is trying to publicly pin the failures on the players for negotiations but pretty much everyone agrees the owners are being dicks. The players seem rightfully mad. We aren’t closer to having Baseball than we were a month ago, and at this rate the season might actually be too short. Yes, too short even for baseball. I await the next update with glee.
I agree that the MLB is messing up big time. The whole thing in major sports about making players honor contracts and the MLB is not meeting theirs. They should have made a clause in contracts for such a scenario. Not so much a pandemic but each club could have had some disaster strike where fans would not be allowed. A major earthquake or hurricane that destroyed a stadium and fans couldn’t attend. However they did not.
They can’t even bring in scabs because if games are played they still owe their players. I think A Rod is still getting a check. MLB REALLY SCREWED THEMSELVES. They are billionaires pay up have a shortened season and pay the players prorate and have as many games as possible.
PS I hate watching baseball and the amount of cheating that goes on and they still haven’t reinstated Shoeless Joe Jackson is a real shane
Shoeless Joe isn’t a great example since he technically didn’t cheat, he took money to throw the World Series
I had a friend who cheers for the Patriots and Yankees (she’s from Boston) tell me that Manfred made her actually like Goodell…I figure that says it all.
I think its arguable that Manfred is the least competent, but far from the most evil
In a fight between the players and owners I will always side with the players unless they give me a good reason not to. In this case both sides are being obstinate and it’s hurting them both. The players would probably get a full pro-rata share if they agreed to a shorter season, and the owners might get some movement out of the players if they offered a full pro-rata share, but neither side is willing to make the first concession, because the players misread the March deal and the owners aren’t willing to lose a little this year in order to keep making money in the future the way the NBA owners are.
The fact that the owners’ first move was to send their initial offer to the media before presenting it to the players is pure bad-faith negotiating and ultimately that’s what led to the two sides becoming entrenched the way they did. There won’t be baseball this year unless someone budges, and if that happens there almost certainly won’t be any in 2021 either when the lockout will happen.
Manfred is a spectacularly bad commissioner who is well on his way to driving the MLB to a premature death. Baseball coming back as things start to return to normal-ish was a spectacular opportunity for goodwill for the sport and not even a hard one to take advantage of, yet somehow they screwed it up royally. (They’re even playing on easy mode for pete’s sake, they have an easy example to look to in the KBO.) The sport is fading badly, and his mark on history is going to be doing nothing but accelerating that.
I would absolutely take a dozen Goodells over him without hesitation.
I haven’t been back to Deadspin since the staff resigned and management scrubbed any semblance of freedom in the newsroom. I’d start reading again if Dave became a freelancer for them and kicked in articles every once in a while. Good stuff as always!
Deadspin was the best and I miss it all the time. Here’s a twitter feed of work from their former staff to fill the void https://twitter.com/UnDeadspin
Thank you for this.
Aw why did you give Adam Silver horns, a lot of people like him
He is indeed the best one, so I gave him smaller horns
History will not remember Rob Manfred kindly. One of the worst commissioners and one of the greediest scumbags sports has ever seen. And he was already terrible before this year. Let’s not forget it was his intention to wipe out 1/3 of the minor leagues long before the pandemic. This just gave him an excuse to do it.
That’s a great Gary Bettman.
Not weasel-y enough.
Manfred is a special kind of terrible, but Bettman is on a whole other level. He’s presided over three labor stoppages, including one where they lost an entire season, and decided that hockey would flourish in places like Phoenix, Atlanta, and Miami. The sport has grown during his tenure, but considering the growth of all the other leagues during that time, it probably would have happened without him. The fact that he’s stayed the commissioner for this long boggles the mind.
The gold medal game for the dumb ass commissioner Olympics between Goodell and Manfred would be a sight to behold.
The really dumb thing with MLB is they blew a huge chance to gain fans imo. They should have started a season a month ago and would be killing ratings with no other sports in town. People would throw it on just cause they are sick of netflix for the 50th night in a row and would love for something live. Now if they do start, they will have to grab peoples attention through NBA and NHL championships AND NFL reg season, possibly all at the same time.
Manfred shouldn’t just have horns, they should be crooked and different sized and point in random directions. Not only is he evil, he’s also completely incompetent and has no clue what he’s doing.
As it is about other sports. I’m sadly announcing. At the age of 47 a legend has gone today.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibor_Benedek
i know that’s a football but i really like how much it looks like all the other sports commissioners are holding implements of their respective sport, except Goodell, who is holding a wallet
manfraud is the absolute worst… makes me miss Selig in a way I never expected…