#Unprecedented MLB season is all about hope and fear

Will it last until tomorrow? Next week? Sept. 1? Sept. 27? Baseball, like the rest of us, answers to a new boss now. What we want and what we can have haven’t been this far apart for most us since we were kids, since our parents told us we couldn’t play ball in the rain, since the principal told us we couldn’t take a day off like Ferris whenever we pleased.

Baseball knows that well by now, chapter and verse, hither and yon. A few months back, when it seemed we would never see the end of the ceaseless labor squabbles, it was hard to believe those feuds would actually be the easy part of all of this.

Looking back, it makes perfect sense, really: awful as they are, we know owner-union warfare. We’ve been there. We’ve survived that, over and over. Angry rhetoric? Really, all Rob Manfred and Tony Clark were doing with that was singing an updated version of an old tune, their voices subbing for Marvin Miller’s and Ray Grebey’s, Donald Fehr’s and Richard Ravitch’s. It’s like hate-listening to a cover of “We Built This City.”

The rest of it, though, has been something else entirely. We never went through this before, not like this, not with a pandemic invading every corner of our lives. Even in 1918, baseball was somehow spared. World War I forced the shortening of the season so that the World Series was over before the worst of that flu outbreak; and though some snapshots survive of a 1919 spring training that featured some players wearing masks, it was mostly under control by then.

Baseball was not spared this time. Baseball, in fact, has so far born more of the brunt than any other professional American team sport. There have already been 102 games knocked off every team’s schedule. The new soundtrack of a day at the ballpark has been simplified: baseballs rattling around bleacher seats, music turned up to a quarter of its usual volume since that’s all that’s necessary.

A few weeks ago, a Mets player sneezed at Citi Field.

Instinctively, three folks in the press box said, “Gesundheit!”

It is that quiet now.

There have been the opt-outs, players who, for various reasons, have chosen not to play this season. So far the Mets and the Yankees have been spared, but the Nationals (Ryan Zimmerman), Braves (Nick Markakis, Felix Hernandez), Dodgers (David Price) and Giants (Buster Posey), among others, haven’t been so lucky.

Worse, though, much worse are the revelations that have arrived several times a week that players have been infected by the coronavirus, and that’s when the difficulty of what baseball is trying to do truly hits home.

Markakis admitted part of the reason he chose to sit was after hearing the firsthand testimony of star teammate Freddie Freeman — 30 years old, no underlying conditions other than an addiction to hitting line drives — who was diagnosed with COVID-19 and has suffered from body aches, headaches, bad chills and a high fever.

The Yankees were affected immediately, when DJ LeMahieu, their MVP in 2019, tested positive, and then a week later when closer Aroldis Chapman did the same. The Mets, adhering to their players’ privacy, would not explain the prolonged absences of Brad Bach and Robinson Cano — another odd parlor-game aspect to this season; if a player spends time on the IL without explanation, we can probably put 2 2 together.

As much as anything, though, the greatest unknowns are the issues we simply have no answers for. For instance: how many positive results are too many positive results? Five percent? 10? What if the virus wheedles its way through an entire starting rotation? We have also been told that the virus is waiting to pounce, with vengeance, in the fall. At what point does that reality collide with the hope of contesting a World Series?

And, of course, there is the most sinister unknown of all:

What happens if someone dies? No commissioner, no league, no sport, nobody of any right frame of mind wants that on their watch, or on their conscience. Sports has avoided that unthinkable issue so far. Maybe it will stay that way. It is certainly the only way to root, for all sports. And for all of us.

But for now, there is today. There is Opening Day. Baseball has made it this far, obstacles and all. We can be happy about that. And about tomorrow. And next week. And as long as we get to have it.