Tag Archives: COVID

Why You Should Care About Baseball Again

A timeline of how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the 2020 ...

Let’s be honest. When it comes to the Big Four of American sports, Major League Baseball is the dullest of the bunch.

Compared to professional football, basketball and hockey, baseball is about as exciting as watching a cat take a nap. For hours at a stretch, often the most exciting thing to happen in a baseball game might be how a player scratches his crotch.

But for the first time since April 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in the sport, baseball matters to America again. And it has nothing to do with the sport itself.Jackie Robinson - The Official Licensing Website of Jackie Robinson

Baseball may be the only canary we have left in the coal mine that is about to become our public school system drilling during a global pandemic.

While basketball and hockey have committed to playing in a “bubble,” baseball, like football, plans to play in its home stadiums, travel together to away games, and return to their homes when the game concludes.

Kind of like a schoolyard.

So far, the results are daunting. The NHL doesn’t report a single COVID case, and the NBA’s last was July 20. They have missed no scheduled games.NBA Orlando restart: What players can expect as they arrive at bubble

Baseball, however, has been staggered by the virus. Just two weeks into the MLB season, and the league has had to cancel, delay or reschedule 20% of its season due to the pandemic. The St. Louis Cardinals announced this week it had seven players and six coaches test positive. The Florida Marlins lost more than half its roster to the virus last week and had to scour its farm system just to field a team. Another Marlins player tests positive for COVID-19; team remains ...

College football is already rethinking its return strategy. UConn became the first Division I NCAA team to cancel its entire season due to coronavirus.UConn Football Announces Cancellation of 2020 Season Due to Risks ...

Meanwhile, students in some schools are already returning to opened classrooms. States like Mississippi, which opened some districts last week, have done  exactly what Trump did with the pandemic: punt the problem to a lower-level grunt. Governor Tate Reeves (R) announced that individual school districts will have to decide whether to open, and how.

Don’t even ask about a school bus plan; there isn’t one.

Have bucks ever passed so quickly?

So we have baseball to see how well COVID plays with others. And keep in mind: These boys have the best resources, the best doctors, the best protective equipment and the best medical advice to help them play safely. A far cry from a Mississippi jungle gym.

Batter up.

The Masked Stinger

This picture is all the rage in Indonesia. Sometimes literally.

The modern-day mummy has no identity, no age, not even a gender. Critics of photojournalist Joshua Irwandi’s snapshot have called last week’s picture a callous, sterile look and the human suffering exacted by a global pandemic. Even Fred Ritchin, dean emeritus of the International Center of Photography, defended the picture’s publication but conceded, “To me, the image was of someone being thrown out, discarded, wrapped in cellophane, sprayed with disinfectant, mummified, dehumanized, othered.”

Exactly. Which is why we need to see more like it.

You gotta hand it to COVID-19. It’s a helluva serial killer. Since New Year’s Eve 2019, it has invaded every continent on Earth, infected 16 million, killed more than 640,000 and left the global economy a quadriplegic.

Yet we still don’t have a face for it. That’s due  in part to COVID’s demands we cover our faces in its grip, an almost Lecter-ian twist of cruelty. We are faceless to the death.

Even when it kills us, COVID leaves few witnesses. We cannot visit the stricken in hospitals or hospice. We cannot see the bodies. Routinely, we are kept from a burial. From memorial. From finality.

This has to be considered unacceptable. We should put faces on things. Faces launch human ships. Anthropomorphize. We need to see what we are fighting — and, more importantly,  what we are fighting for.

After all, we have faces for:

  • Joy20 of the Most Famous Photographs in History - Learn the Backstory
  • Victory25 of the most iconic photographs
  • Failure25 of the most iconic photographs
  • RaceKilling of George Floyd - Wikipedia
  • Defiance25 of the most iconic photographs
  • Peacefamous photographer Margaret Bourke-White's iconic photo of Ghandi spinning wool taken in 1946
  • WarSyria: Little boy in Aleppo a reminder of war's horror - CNN
  • Silliness25 of the most iconic photographs
  • Sadness 20 of the Most Famous Photographs in History - Learn the Backstory

So for now, this is the face of COVID. I get the mummy analogies. They’re hard to miss. But to me, I can’t help but think of a spider-webbed insect, freshly wrapped and sapped after a moment of distraction. I guess each viewer will see something different. Perhaps that’s the point.

The 28th Amendment

A scientist at Houston Methodist Hospital last month preparing patient samples to be tested for the coronavirus.

Starting a new faith is a bitch. Just ask David Koresh, Jim Jones or Jesus.

I just can’t get people to buy the concept that science is a faith, as malleable as warm Silly Putty. But there’s no time for a wholesale conversion.

Now, we’ve got to form that putty into a new Amendment to the Constitution, the 28th. The last two were pretty dull: No. 26, passed in 1971, made it unconstitutional to prevent anyone older than 18 from voting (cc: The South); and No. 27, passed in 1992, that all congressional pay raises  must be voted on by Congress.

I propose Number XXVIII: Congress shall pass no laws restricting or restraining the collection and dissemination of scientific data gathered buy government health agencies (i.e., the separation of Science and State.)

The need comes after Donald Trump ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all COVID-19 patient information to a central database in Washington, starting Wednesday.

Anthony Fauci may want to hit the Craigslist job board. The administration sees the object hurtling toward it, reality — in the form of a Depression, pandemic and Cold War loss — and are hoping to deflect its impact until after the Nov. 3 election.With Dr. Fauci, Trump picked the one fight he can't win - Business ...

But this has been an Amendment whose need arose long ago. No president — Democrat or Republican — should be the gatekeeper to the scientific data collected nationwide. We fund every department in the federal and state government, including the CDC and the departments of Health and Human Services.

Every American citizen has a right to find out the crime rate in their neighborhood. Shouldn’t we have the same access to scientific data as we do criminal data? If we can obtain the murder rate in our city, why not the COVID rate?

The Trump response is to be expected. His inclination has traditionally been to NDA any problem he sees as a threat to his power or profits. The antics just get more desperate the closer we get to a quarter to late.

So come on, Joe. Propose change. The founders saw this threat when religion held sway. You can make a nod to them, while telling younger voters there’s an option of change.

We’ve got a grim choice before us come November: The ailing grandpa versus the ailing, crazy grandpa. You want a real base in your corner? Try science. They’re drawing believers by the legions.