Tales of Our Times
By JOHN BARTLIT
New Mexico Citizens
for Clean Air & Water

Baseball Season Does The Job With Well Tested COVID Data

Baseball fans delight in James Earl Jones’s slow, rolling sermon on baseball in the 1989 movie, “Field of Dreams.” The diction is folksy: “… The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball … This field, this game — it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”

Now some 30 years later, baseball is working hard to carry out the promise. The nation is bogged down in the COVID pandemic. Schools are bogged down. Business is bogged down. Each voting bloc is stuck on which party has the better cure. Prospects are bogged down.

Ball games, too, look weird—as if a fabled field of dreams were on national TV. Major-leaguers stepped up to bat in games with cardboard faces or ghosts in the grandstands. In 1918, scenes of the Spanish Flu were scarce before TV. Yet, records are clear that wearing masks was a mixed bag then as now. However the times, baseball just might be the ticket for raising public spirits and prospects.

Major League Baseball has assets that are especially helpful in fighting the pandemic. The astute Dr. Anthony Fauci took account of these assets when he threw out the first ball for the short season. He made that first pitch on TV July 23 at the home park of the World Series champion Washington Nationals.

Baseball is a business that aims to compete strongly and win. In the process, baseball develops traits that happen to help fight COVID, too.

Six big ones are:

• Of all team sports, the action on a baseball field is the most widely dispersed.
• Bottom to top, the industry has ample financial resources.
• The cohort of major league players, coaches, staff, and officials is well above average in overall health.
• The cohort is large enough to be statistically meaningful, yet small and controlled well enough to be observed in very close detail.
• Baseball is the epicenter of brown-bag statistics. So it kept endless data on COVID, on the changes to the protocol that followed, and on how the data differed after improving the protocol. The stats were not hot topics for election polls.
• Top to bottom, players and officials with different politics want to get their business reopened and get fans back in the stands quickly and permanently. Baseball needs to get vendors back doing their routines up and down the aisles, “Getcher hot dogs here … peanuts, Crackerjacks!” Working to get back is simple yet hard to do.

These traits yielded a stream of high quality data. The COVID protocol evolved from the data as it came from some 170 thousand tests. A few findings made news; all the rest were the underlying data that fill in the meaningful context. In this way, our nation gained a baseball season plus the data that did the trick. The final system went over eight weeks with no players testing positive until the middle of the last game. 

Photo from 1918 during the Spanish Flu. Photo by Thomas Carter

This year’s rules upset many of the ins and outs of baseball. The protocol began with the usual means of fighting the spread of COVID—testing, contact tracing, masks, and social distancing. Yet, the 101 pages of details also tied to special parts of baseball. Catch this game changer: managers lost the right to stomp out on the field for a close bark at the umpire. The rules got harsher after the game. From the outset, a prime ground rule outlawed the old ways of players going out on the town. Penalties included fines and suspensions.

The big question is how did COVID data change with people’s behaviors. Play ball! Within three or four games after the season opened, some 19 Miami Marlins had tested positive for COVID. Soon the St Louis Cardinals had had over a dozen players and staff test positive and 13 games postponed. Contact tracing found the infections came largely from a few players sneaking out to old stomping grounds downtown.

Photo from 1918 during the Spanish Flu. Courtesy/John Bartlit

The finding called for added muscle in the protocol. Each team had to name a COVID compliance officer. Their duties included explaining the COVID rules to players in English or in Spanish and sending in a weekly report on team compliance to the league commissioner.

The game’s constituents came to trust their mutual needs above their scores of personal views. The games were played. The Dodgers prevailed. Once again, the enterprise of baseball won out for us all.