DThe tradition began one afternoon in April 1910 with one of the first prominent politicians with a heart for the country’s favorite sport. There William Howard Taft, a stout man with a white mustache, tie and hat, got up in his box at the Washington Nationals stadium, got a baseball and threw it into the field with a swing. Since then, just about every president of the United States has attended the opening ceremony of the new season at least once during his term in order to honor the special sentimental status of the game in American society. And to stage yourself as the darling of the masses.
Ironically, Donald Trump, who likes to claim that a professional club was interested in him and his baseball arts when he was a teenager, surprisingly refrained from making such a public appearance in the three years of his tenure. But on Thursday, when he said at a press conference about the corona virus and the gradual resumption of play in the big leagues, he signaled a change of heart. The head of the New York Yankees, “a close friend”, would have invited him to such a guest performance. An appointment is also set: August 15th. On Sunday, Trump backed off and announced on Twitter that he unfortunately had to cancel. The virus demands its highest concentration. He had to have talks about a vaccine. And he assured the nation: “We’ll make up for that later in the season.”
However, it is now rather questionable whether Major League Baseball will be able to pull through the schedule that was started three weeks late last week in the midst of the Covid pandemic. On Monday, it was announced that twelve players and two Miami Marlins coaches had been infected with the corona virus. And that the team had started with the Philadelphia Phillies, although four cases of infection were already known internally. The two teams were canceled for safety reasons.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred weakened (“I don’t see this as a nightmare. I’m still optimistic that we can continue playing and end our season even with such an outbreak”), but the project is on shaky ground. This is in stark contrast to the experiments in basketball and football, where the games are played at select locations such as the Walt Disney World amusement park in Florida and under consistently shielded conditions, from which no infections were reported.
The baseball league, however, preferred to run its program in the stadiums of the 30 clubs scattered across the continent. A special solution was only found for the only Canadian team – the Toronto Blue Jays – because the borders between the United States and its northern neighbor are closed and a series of quarantine requirements exist for all exceptional cases. The team was repotted to Buffalo.
In order to massively reduce the risk of infection, the league officials had drawn up a paper that was over a hundred pages long, in which all regulations and requirements for the behavior of the professionals were laid down. However, the document no longer stands for a sound approach. Players and coaches have become nervous about the positive tests. “I want to be honest, I’m scared. I’m really scared, ”said manager Dave Martinez of the Washington Nationals, where epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 79-year-old director of the National Institute for Infectious Diseases, officially opened the season with an accident. “You can see half a team getting infected and traveling from city to city. I have friends on the Miami team, it really stinks. “
Incidentally, the much-noticed appearance of Fauci only seemed to have given Trump his spontaneous idea to announce the trip to the New York Yankees. It was probably a publicity maneuver to steal the show from the man, who warns behind the scenes of a policy of easing in the face of more than 150,000 American corona deaths, and in public like a serious opponent to Trump’s haphazard action works. The real punch line came to the public on Monday from the “New York Times”: Accordingly, there had been no invitation from the club. Instead, the episode must be placed on the list of more than 20,000 false or deliberately misleading statements that the Washington Post has been writing since the beginning of his term in early 2017.
“Baseball is in big trouble”
The league is about more. This is also because the economic damage, which is extrapolated without a spectator in the arenas to a loss of more than $ 600,000 (511,440 euros) per game and could amount to a total loss of four billion dollars (3.41 billion euros) , should still grow. “Baseball is in big trouble,” says Andrew Morris, professor of infectious diseases at the University of Toronto. “I wonder if they listen to expert advice or if their experts give them good advice. This was not a plan someone would have made up who knows what he is talking about. ”
Pitcher David Price of the Los Angeles Dodgers had decided to give up the season and not play because of the uncertainties. The first news mourned him in concern: “Now we’re really going to see if Major League Baseball puts player health first.”
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