Editor's Note: Amy Bass (@ bassab1) is a professor of sports studies at Manhattanville College and the author of "One Goal: A Coach, a Team, and the Game that Brought a Divided Town Together" and "Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete », among other titles. The opinions expressed here are those of the author. Read more opinion at CNNe.com/opinion.
(CNN) - For one of the many Miami Marlins members who tested positive for covid-19, it has probably been a century since Rudy Gobert, the first NBA player to test positive for covid-19 in March, He said he regretted minimizing the risks of the disease. But here we are: The Atlanta Braves faced the Marlins in an exhibition game last week, the Baltimore Orioles have no one to play now, the Yankees game against the Philies was postponed, and questions remain about why the Marlins played Sunday, after news broke that four players tested positive, including, apparently, José Ureña, scratched from their scheduled start.
The games can only continue until they can no longer, something Florida schools, which are slated to reopen in August, could take into account, especially as the Marlins await their latest round of test results in hotel rooms in Pennsylvania. Theirs is a luxury that students and teachers will undoubtedly not have at their disposal during the next school year.
Instead of serving as a reward for obtaining our response to a global pandemic, installing the necessary measures of social distancing and face masks, masks that, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), could lead to this. at a manageable level in a matter of weeks: baseball is now a microcosm of how to best fight our implosive failures, a great experiment for our other institutions, perhaps especially for the public schools that the White House man is so eager to reopen so America can "get back to work." Just as sports, particularly the NBA, became the key signal for the United States to shut everything down in March, it now has to show the way back.
First, we talked about going back to sports and school, to gyms and movie theaters, in late April, when the curve began to flatten out in American hot spots through hard work, strict mandates on the use of mask and social distancing. Even here in New Rochelle, New York, where my daughter's school was one of the first to close on the East Coast, plans for the fall began, building on a trajectory that made sense according to the data.
The NBA, one of the first major institutions in the country to close, waking up many Americans to the impending disaster, crafted a plan to finally end its season, choosing Florida as the place for its true bubble.
The NBA, like most Americans, thought we'd already be in a different place. Well we are. And because of a weakly coordinated and fundamentally uninformed reaction to a global pandemic across the southern and southwestern United States, one that ignored New York's devastating lessons in national consciousness, as well as a list of best practices by public health officials and experts is worse.
However, we still talk about the new school year, about soccer games and science labs, as if public education is the product of magical thinking and a professional baseball league should be doing the public health work that the government federal has apparently abandoned.
The hindsight can literally be a killer. We are in unknown territory, a place where we have to reinvent sport as a social problem to solve, one that cannot be a distraction from reality because it is immersed in it, right down to the chin.
In April, the NBA's planned Florida did not include single-day records of cases or deaths. In April, baseball was considering Arizona as its landing site. Think about it for a hot minute, and not in terms of the weather.
On the one hand, sport should not have come back before anything else. Playing the game without spectators is not a solution: it is an indicator that perhaps it should not happen, with the lessons learned in the Champions League game between Atalanta and Valencia in February, starting the outbreak that ended much of Bergamo , Italy. Why should we think that if the sport is not safe for its spectators, it could be safe for its athletes?
But we have passed the point of asking if sport should be back: sport has returned and there is much to learn from it. In many ways, baseball feels like the perfect place to try it all out, a game in which physical contact, except for the occasional bank clearance bouts, collision in center field, and second-round dramatic etiquette, often It is the essence of sportsmanship, whether it is a maximum of five for a spectacular catch or the gregarious group of jumping joy that greets a home run hitter as he crosses the plate, ensuring that what happens on the field, at least symbolically, stay in the field.
But the covid-19 is not a good sport, it knows few limits, if any, and it has no loyalty to one team over another.
The fact is, despite the profound resources of the United States' national pastime, which funds constant testing and isolation protocols, the Marlins, a team valued at nearly $ 1 billion, were unable to keep their list, a list that is Smaller than my daughter's social studies class, safe after her first three games this truncated season.
Contagion on the surface, according to the CDC, should not be the focus of our preventative practices, something that is guiding the school's reopening plans involving Plexiglas, alternate days, and "take-out" bags from the cafeteria. But as low as the risk is, it's good enough to keep the Yankees out of the visiting club at the Citizens Bank Ballpark in Philadelphia because the Marlins occupied the space just 24 hours earlier.
And my son is supposed to sit at my desk ?
Unlike my daughter's school district (of nearly 11,000 students, approximately 730 employees, and a 180-day school year), the MLB wrote a 113-page manual to outline a 60-game season that involved approximately 8,000 people, with players , unlike the NBA bubble, living at home and traveling despite the fact that at least 19 teams had positive cases before the new "spring training" began. They did this while ignoring that the New York and Boston teams had very different scenarios, places that worked hard through difficult mandates to flatten their curves, than those of the Miami Marlins, the Arizona Diamondbacks or the Houston Astros, whose bases of local fans are now facing catastrophic levels of the pandemic, something that so concerned the Canadian government that it essentially told the Blue Jays to find a new home until the end of the season.
Meanwhile, despite being considered the richest nation in the world, America's schools do not seem to have the infrastructure of a baseball team, and yet it remains the arena we have for childcare during on work days, for food and social services and, in the coming months, heat and light. As the American Academy of Pediatrics concludes, in its statement about why school is so much more than academic, "our nation's response to covid-19 has exposed inequalities and consequences for children that need to be addressed."
Covid-19 has created no fractures. It has put the spotlight on them. Maybe if we fund our schools like baseball, if teachers got contracts like Mike Trout or Mookie Betts or, at a minimum, didn't have to pay for their own school supplies and bulletin boards, they would be better prepared to work this fall.
But they are not. And it turns out that even with everything it has, including an evidence-based reopening approach that doesn't involve hopes that the virus will "go away" one day, baseball already has problems, ones that we must take seriously if we want to solve this and find a new normality with which we can all live. So let's play ball, because right now, sports may be the only national examples of public health that we have.
