Inaugurating a brand new ballpark with a viral outbreak instead of a baseball game is either a grim forecast for the 2020 season or a killer logline for a straight-to-Syfy zombie movie. But what it is not, is a surprise.
The Texas Rangers’ string of Globe Life Field staffers testing positive for the coronavirus should have been an obvious, inevitable conclusion of arrogant and aggressive state-wide plan to reopen the economy against CDC guidelines, which the franchise embraced by instructing staffers to return to the office. Somehow, Major League Baseball thought otherwise.
“The course of the virus has both been unpredictable and rapidly changing from month to month,” said the league in an email response to a Daily News inquiry on the Rangers outbreak, specifically, what number of coronavirus cases would trigger a shutdown.
“We fully recognize that we will have to constantly evaluate the current Covid-19 situation, and potentially make operational changes in order to keep our players and staff safe,” MLB added, without committing to a threshold.
Let’s take an Olympic-class leap and assume that MLB’s march against the grain of rising coronavirus cases in 36 states is ordered in good faith; that the July 1 spring training or tentative July 23 opening day would get pulled if only the “current COVID-19 situation” took a turn. Even allowing for incompetence, the current course of events is less “unpredictable” than a prolonged rendition of the Parable of the Sower.
According to ESPN’s Saturday report, the Rangers held a Zoom requiring employees to return to work on June 12. But on June 6, Dallas County Health and Human Services director Dr. Philip Huang acknowledged COVID-19 could, in fact, mess with Texas, and did so without peering into a crystal ball or consulting an oracle.
“What we haven’t seen is that 14-day decline in those indicators,” Huang said, referring to the CDC’s well-established criteria for reopening “that everyone said we really should see before we start opening up,” Huang said of his jurisdiction, which borders Globe Life Field.
Spencer Fox, the PhD candidate co-leading the University of Texas at Austin’s COVID-19 Modeling Consortium said in May that “reopening will continue to fuel the epidemic” if the trends he identified continued.
And days before Rangers’ outbreak was reported, Tarrant County health director Vinny Taneja acknowledged the “clear correlation” with reopening workspaces like Globe Life Field and the continued spread. “There are states that are re-opening their economies, including Texas, and the bulk of the volume is coming from those states, so there’s something to be learned from that,” said Taneja.
Whatever lesson there was, the Rangers hadn’t learned it. (Few teams seem to be learning from or even listening to their local health offices.)
Instead, the Rangers forced their workers to strive for whatever razor-thin productivity margin could be gained from a cubicle over Slack. And for what, to ensure Corey Kluber gets to six wins instead of five? All in service of a 60-game micro-season we can only hope will be defined by small sample sizes and asterisks instead of permanent lung damage.
What’s worse is that the employees that spoke out had to do it anonymously because they realize the challenge of maintaining a job in a highly coveted industry like America’s Pastime.
“I realize — we all realize — how fortunate we are to have a job right now,” one Rangers employee said to ESPN. “We were not furloughed. We were not fired altogether like some staffers at other clubs. We’re able to continue to keep our families fed.”
If Rangers workers can know that quitting their job to protect their health would expose them to unemployment rates rising at COVID-speed, you can guarantee their employer knows they’re offering more of a “Sophie’s Choice” than a real one.
“The health and safety of our employees are a top priority, and the Rangers will continue to diligently enforce the pandemic protocols that are in place for front-office employees at Globe Life Field,” said the Rangers in a statement, declining to answer the Daily News’ questions about what they would need to pull the plug. The state included mandatory face mask-wearing, temperature checks, and all sorts of things to keep Globe Life Field open for business, no matter the cost.
This is where MLB should have intervened. Tell the Rangers that they’re needlessly sending workers in to do a nonessential task with minimal benefit. The risk incurred entirely by their staff isn’t worth the reward given entirely to the ownership. This insistence on underestimating the threat of coronavirus– again, being nice — could kill someone, either in your office or the community that may have paid over $1.6 billion in taxes for your stadium — three times more than the Rangers’ estimate of public costs.
So call it off.
But the league won’t. Because intervening on the Rangers is a double standard, one that would immediately concede the entire basis for baseball in 2020 as a dangerous, foolish and ultimately selfish endeavor that carries a self-anointed air of importance, with safety risks passed on to everyone but the people that stand to profit the most.