What’s more American than baseball and apple pie? Lots of things. What a stupid saying. That said, baseball is pretty darn American. And you can add it to the list of things that Donald Trump broke, as a single weekend of play and COVID-19 has already ravaged one team—the Miami Marlins (of course) has 14 positive cases!—and forced the cancellation of games as the team that last played the Marlins, the Philadelphia Phillies, has to quarantine.
So why is this Donald Trump’s fault?
Let’s head over to Germany, where (arguably, of course) the world’s most competent leadership shepherded the country through a pandemic ravaging neighbors surrounding it—Italy, France, Spain, the UK, Sweden, and the increasingly autocratic countries of the old Soviet bloc (all of which are chronically underreporting their death and case counts). Yet despite a continent on fire with COVID-19, Germany has emerged with a relatively small death toll and minimal new cases.
Germany’s per-capita death toll is 110 per million, compared to the UK’s 674, Spain’s 608, Italy’s 581 and … the United State’s 454 (and still rapidly rising). Yesterday, 596 Americans died because of the disease. In Germany, that number was two.
And how did Germany get its pandemic under control? Testing, contact tracing, and early medical intervention, along with a strong social net that allowed the country to weather its shutdown. Also, it’s people weren’t Trump-level stupid about masks. That’s a big advantage the United States, thanks to Twitter, Fox News and Facebook, doesn’t have. This shit isn’t rocket science. Either a country and its people commit to taming the disease, or the disease wins.
Here’s the same chart above, but for the United States:
You don’t have to be a stable genius to see that Germany managed the situation well while Trump crapped the bed. The Germans had the same virus, less time to prepare than the United States, a more integrated economy with the then-world’s worst hotspots, and poorer understanding of how to both treat the disease, and how to stem its spread.
So what happens when you do things right? You get to open up! Us parents can look on with envy as Germany’s school’s reopen, patrons can eat at restaurants (with proper precautions), and some semblance of normalcy returns. And as the numbers show above, they’ve been able to carefully reopen while containing to keep new cases to a minimum.
And part of that normalcy? SPORTS! In fact, the nation’s premier sports league of any kind, futbol’s Bundesliga, finished its season a month ago. “There was a trophy, there were medals, and there were commemorative T-shirts. Only the fans were missing as Bayern Munich celebrated its title Saturday and the Bundesliga breathed a sigh of relief. Its restart plan worked,” reported the Associated Press. Sports fans here would be ecstatic to see any of its sports leagues complete a season.
But that happened in a country in which the virus wasn’t running rampant. Here, in the United States, we’ve seen some sports resume, particularly those that are more conducive to social distancing like NASCAR and golf, and the US Open is supposed to happen at the end of August. Major League Soccer held a tournament, though two teams had to withdraw because of COVID-19 outbreaks. You can do that in a tournament, much harder in a regular season.
As a sports fanatic, I do miss my sports. My son and I have taken to watching vintage seasons of the Chicago Bears to scratch that itch. But tentative steps to restart sports in this country, while the pandemic rages, haven’t been great.
There’s the problem with baseball, just days into its season, that threaten to scuttle the entire attempt to play the game. The NBA has gone into a “bubble” at Disney World. In Orlando. The one in Florida. Ground zero for the nation’s worst hotspot. In a state where the governor is doing little-to-nothing to try and get a handle on the outbreak. The league is attempting to finish off a season that began before the pandemic, with a limited number of teams (all the crappy ones, like my Chicago Bulls, got to stay home safe). So far, so good. But will it hold?
Meanwhile, the NFL is hoping to play a normal season, but like baseball, it doesn’t have the benefit of cramming the whole league and playing its game inside a bubble. Team rosters are too big (55 players vs. 15 for an NBA squad), the playing field is too big, and the season is too long (you can only play 1 NFL game a week, while the NBA season will start July 30 and end, at the latest with a 7-game finals, on October 13). The NFL has to play all of its teams, 32, while the NBA turned the rest of its season into a type of extended playoffs, with 22 teams, and that number will whittle down quickly as teams get eliminated.
We’re still months from the NFL season, but so far, things aren’t looking so hot. Trump desperately wants the NFL to restart (sans kneeling, of course) to bolster his claims that the nation is getting back to normal. The NFL owners, a gaggle of Republican billionaires, want to deliver. But with headlines like “Vikings infection control officer tests positive for COVID-19” and “NFLPA informs players 12 rookies tested positive for COVID-19” and “NFL expecting ‘hundreds’ of positive COVID-19 tests” making the rounds, it’s easy to see how things might go awry.
Germany got its pandemic under control. They got sports. (And school.)
Trump never even tried to stem our own pandemic, and as a result, sports is still a problem. Best-case scenario?
A sports season in which the winner goes to the team that can best weather a global mass-death event is, well, stupid and broken.
And Trump did it. He broke so many things. People died. Economy wrecked.
And he broke sports.
Update: