Have to be smart
North American sports leagues can learn from the mistakes being made all over the world
As cautionary tales go, you could do a lot worse than Rostov FC.
The soccer team, which plays in the Russian top flight, ran into a bit of a pickle as that league launched its restart when six players tested positive for COVID-19. Under the league’s safety protocols, that meant the entire squad would have to enter a quarantine period. Rostov, naturally, asked for its upcoming match with Sochi FC to be postponed. But Sochi, the cheeky devils, didn’t agree. (Sochi FC is evidently the Houston Astros of the Russian Premier League.) Rostov had to field a team of teenagers from its youth team, who were promptly thumped 10-1.
Or how about the Orlando Pride? The club in the NWSL, the women’s pro league that returns to action with a tournament beginning this weekend, pulled out of the competition after six players and four staff tested positive for the virus. Reports have said that some members of the team had gone out to bars, but given the situation in Florida at the moment, Patient Zero of the Pride could just have easily been buying groceries or filling a prescription.
Then there is the PGA Tour. For a brief period on Wednesday it looked like the whole thing would be shut down again after a batch of COVID-related withdrawals, but instead it will carry on and hope that was the worst of it. There’s no single explanation for positive tests among the pro golf set, and there so far hasn’t been any Novak Djokovic-style cellphone videos of shirtless caddies boozing and dancing. But the golfers and their caddies aren’t under any kind of a bubble, and they just played in South Carolina, one of the many states with rising coronavirus cases.
The odd bit of good news in these situations, for the North American sports leagues trying to get back to business amid the pandemic, is that they might spook players into observing safety protocols. There have been enough positive tests among athletes in the four major sports, from those on the Dallas Cowboys to the Indiana Pacers to the Toronto Blue Jays, from the Sacramento Kings to the San Jose Sharks to the Philadelphia Phillies, that those who do ultimately show up for training camps and, eventually, games, would be well aware that they, despite being young and healthy, are not immune to the virus.
They might also look to Europe for examples of how professional sports can resume with, at least so far, no major setbacks. England’s Premier League resumed with training camps in midMay, and game play began just over a week ago. In its first round of COVID-19 tests last month, there were six positives among 748 players and staff, causing a frisson of doubt that its Project Restart was going to work. But as teams adjusted to the safety protocols, those numbers came down. The EPL has now had five testing periods in June, totalling almost 6,400 results, and had just five positive for COVID-19. The low numbers allowed the league to drop plans to have players quarantined in hotels for the start of the resumed season and, unlike the bubble scenarios planned by the NHL, NBA and MLS, players have stayed at their homes and used all their normal stadiums. The story has been the same in Germany, Spain, and Italy, all of which have returned to play in something approximating normal conditions, albeit absent fans and with comical faux-crowd sound effects added to some television broadcasts. The roar of a crowd that comes in two beats too late after a missed shot has been one of the pandemic’s unexpected joys. None of those leagues has been undone by a COVID-19 outbreak, and each has so far avoided the dreaded situation of a gamechanging player forced to sit out of a key match while quarantined.
But it’s also true that all of those countries made significant progress in beating back the spread of the coronavirus before they returned to play. Italy, Spain and Germany all are confirming fewer than 10 new daily cases per million people, while the United Kingdom is at around 12 new cases per million per day. The United States on Wednesday cracked 101 new cases per million. (Canada is at 6.8 per million.) That contrast should be of particular interest to Major League Baseball, which plans to use home stadiums throughout the United States rather than an isolated bubble. The European model for return-to-play, minus the European success in bringing down the daily rate of COVID19 infections.
While any one of those soccer leagues could yet be rocked by an outbreak, that they have avoided them so far suggests it can at least be done here. But given the difference in rates of viral spread between there and the United States, athletes on this continent will have to be ultra-cautious. Bubbles of steel, if you will. The setbacks already seen provide clear lessons: Avoid risky settings, follow the rules, realize that a little slip-up can bring a positive test and all its associated negative impacts. Oh, and don’t hold a tennis tournament/nightclub rave. Do not let Novak Djokovic be your guide. Or the Orlando Pride, for that matter.
While any one of those soccer leagues could yet be rocked by an outbreak, that they have avoided them so far suggests it can at least be done here.
TORONTO — The rundown is never a comfortable place for anyone on a baseball team to be caught.
Whether nailed between first and second, third and home or wherever it may be on the basepaths, the outcome is rarely good.
Toronto Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro may have found him in the most high stakes version imaginable of such a no-win predicament as he attempts to find a place for his team to convene not just for training camp in less than a week but to play the abbreviated 2020 season.
Such is the plight of running what is essentially a homeless baseball team, one that still doesn’t know where to tell its players to report or where it will play any of its 30 home games in a 60-game schedule approved earlier this week.
Goal No. 1 for Shapiro is to operate in the same fashion of the other 29 Major League Baseball front offices — have both training camp and the regular season based at their home ballparks.
As unrealistic as that idea was a week ago, the disaster that is Florida became even worse with a COVID-19 strength dose of desperation to the task facing Jays management.
Thanks to the outbreak of positive tests with players and staff in Florida, as of Thursday evening, the Jays are a team with an urgency to get back together but with no fixed address.
MLB has for the most part stayed quiet about the Jays plight, but of all the back-towork headaches, the troubles facing the only foreign-based team has to be high on commissioner Rob Manfred’s agenda.
At some point, schedules have to be released by the league and safety protocols established. Tough to do without a home as the Canada-U.S. border remains shut to non-essential travel until at least July 21, two days before the 2020 season is scheduled to begin.
The Jays options remain less than stellar. Remaining in Florida never was ideal, even with a renovated TD Ballpark in Dunedin, a stadium that has been enhanced with improved lighting. Temperatures in July and August are sizzlingly brutal and late-day storms are a real concern. (There’s a reason the Rays play under a roof at Tropicana Field, after all.)
Buffalo, home of the triple-A Bisons, has some appeal but in terms of facilities, it’s less than ideal as a home.
So the best case venue remains Rogers Centre in downtown Toronto, one that might be the least viable should Canadian officials play hard ball and refuse to relax the restrictions for baseball players.
That leaves the task to the Jays to lobby the Canadian and Ontario governments, in an attempt to convince them that foreign baseball players are worthy of special treatment denied to its citizens.
If you buy the notion that Canadians have been doing the pandemic thing far more responsibly that Americans — and the numbers support this, obviously — it could be a hard point to sell.
Opening the gates to pro baseball players from multiple cities will undoubtedly be met coolly from Canadian medical experts (and no doubt the public and some politicians) who will prefer American-based athletes stay far, far away from the Canadian border they are currently banned from crossing.
While the Jays were not particularly shocked with Wednesday’s development in which tests came back reporting that multiple players and staff based in Dunedin had tested positive for the virus, it certainly was alarming.
Obviously, the Jays have to make a decision — and soon — though they could open training camp in Dunedin and shift it to Toronto part way through if given the clearance.
The green light may be slow to arrive, however, if at all.
In some quarters, the argument against will be seen as a strong one, notably why should professional athletes be exempted from rules the rest of the country has been living under for more than three months now? And secondly, why would a government clear the path for those same athletes given that a portion of them have already proven incapable of avoiding the virus?
Factor in that visiting teams in the Jays 10-team vision would be coming from New York, Philadelphia, Miami, Tampa, Atlanta and more and the Jays case will be weakened even further.
Shapiro and the Jays lobby, which has been active for a while now, will surely counter with a well formulated plan. As one option, they will no doubt present a plan suggesting the Jays can essentially operate under a bubble that would have teams shuttle directly from Pearson airport to the Rogers Centre where players can be housed in the hotel attached to the stadium.
The Jays will argue that if the NHL has received clearance for Canadian cities to become playoff hubs, why not baseball? The hockey plan is more of a bubble, however, and doesn’t include travel and a rotating cast of characters.
These won’t be easy days ahead for Shapiro, who has to have coaching and support staff and 60 players report to a venue and undergo testing prior to July 1. It’s a complicated potential season for every North American pro sports team, but none have the unique challenges facing the Jays.