New York Baseball

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Baseball Is Playing for Its Life, and Ours
An outbreak of infections soon after reopening has struck a blow at more than just the Marlins.

By Doug Glanville
Mr. Glanville is a former Major League Baseball player and a sports commentator.

Aug. 2, 2020, 11:00 a.m. ET

In 1996, my rookie year in the major leagues with the Chicago Cubs, our manager Jim Riggleman often reminded us that we should play for the name on the front of our uniforms, not the name on the back. It was a noble idea — team before self — reinforced by the power big league athletes can feel when they realize they are representing entire cities, states, even countries, and taking a place in a long history of the sport they are so passionate about.

Last week, we learned once again that Covid-19 does not care about such loyalties. Only a few days after the Major League Baseball season opened, the Miami Marlins were dealing with an outbreak, with the number of players and staff infected with the coronavirus jumping from four to 17 in a matter of days. Quick action was taken: Games were postponed or canceled and the league announced it would require each team to have a “compliance officer” to enforce health safety rules.

Then Marlins infections hit 20; more games were postponed and canceled. ESPN reported that the league’s commissioner, Rob Manfred, told the players’ union executive director Tony Clark that if safety rules were not more stringently followed, shutting down the season could become possible. Then the St. Louis Cardinals reported positive tests for one player and three staff members. On the record, Mr. Manfred told ESPN’s Karl Ravech that “there is no reason to quit now”and that the situation was “manageable.”

Baseball teams were in the midst of spring training on March 11 when the N.B.A. halted its season because of the pandemic (the basketball league resumed games without fans in attendance on July 30), unleashing a ripple effect in the sports world and beyond. Baseball shut down soon after and quickly went to work trying to find the right time and way to get back on the field safely.

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The usual rancorous labor tensions made for a protracted timeline as they fought to agree on the terms of re-engagement, but eventually, it was “play ball.” Unlike the N.B.A. and some other leagues, baseball did not create a “bubble” for its players, given the real estate required and the size of these traveling teams. They were allowed to return home after games, undoubtedly increasing their chances of exposure and the risk for others beyond the clubhouse. Players and staff have taken precautions to protect their families and some players have even opted out of the season entirely. Still, day by day, the league is scrambling to contain the opponent that had put them out of business for so long, and is threatening to do so again.

Most Americans, even those who are not fans, are watching professional sports closely, not only to see our favorite team compete for a championship, but to see these institutions, whose power grew out of our collective imagination, fighting to win a real-time battle over this threat to our current existence. Even when humility tells us that triumph is simply prolonging our ability to safely play another day.


As usual, baseball is never just about baseball. It is called our national pastime for a reason. The virus has dealt a serious blow not just to the league’s operation but, in some sense, to the nation itself: Our confidence has been shaken, our helplessness reinforced, our anxiety and caution ramped up yet again. Baseball was entering the war against the pandemic, and the world was positioned to benefit from the information that would be gathered. The league, armed to the teeth with power and privilege, access to testing, cash flow, precision data collection, and high-powered, lower-risk athletes playing outdoors, was supposed to prevail.

Baseball’s success, then, will be our success; its failure, our failure. We want to know we can win this fight, without being curled up in a ball while waiting for a vaccine, even though we quietly understand that many variables that give these sports advantages in this fight are not fully available to the vast majority of people. Still, we hope that baseball’s eventual victory will wash over us as one.

I remember my time on the Phillies in wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. As both a player and a player representative, I wondered how we would justify coming back to play at all. In the grand scheme of things, we were only playing a game. We were nonessential on paper. But when we did return, we found that some of what we recaptured was essential — to the uplift of our spirit and to the restoration of the society we created with our inspiration and our passion for fair competition and gamesmanship. It had become larger than the scoreboard.



We know this game is still in progress. As the players and the league grapple with the outbreaks, and perhaps more infections to come, they have been forced to reconsider all of their protocols while still trying to keep the game recognizable and fair. As in any game, we do not know if they will succeed, but we can take some comfort from the fact that baseball is willing to find out for us.

We hope to come out of this season with a new world champion, the fulfillment of a baseball season completed. We hope that we will one day retire this virus, with an asterisk, to our scariest of histories, and that baseball and other sports will help get us there by aggressively gathering information about the risks we are all facing. In the end, this will be prove to be more valuable than anything normalcy can provide.

In the game we are playing now, there are no names on the front or the back of our jerseys. We are playing to survive.

Doug Glanville (@dougglanville), a former Major League Baseball player, an ESPN baseball analyst and the author of “The Game From Where I Stand.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/opinion/baseball-coronavirus-Marlins.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage