It’s Not As Easy As Just Picking Up The Bat & Ball
Professional sports are a business.
It costs a lot of money to go to a game and the players also get paid hefty salaries to play. This doesn’t even take in to account the contracts worked out by the various television stations across the country, both locally and nationally, to broadcast the games for everyone to watch.
It isn’t just tossing the ball around with Dad on a Sunday afternoon.
What has really come to the forefront of conversation is the percentages of revenue and how it affects the league and its players/owners as a whole. Can professional sporting leagues survive the varying circumstances, at least this year? Take, for instance, baseball. How will professional baseball cope with likely close to half of MLB games gone?
Major League Baseball is the trickiest because it lacks a salary cap. That is going to make it much more challenging to negotiate financially and please both ownership and players for every team.
Say for instance that an agreement is reached and the players are ready to take the field. All of a sudden, one player or manager on a single team gets diagnosed with COVID-19.
Then what?
Should the games continue with the risk of it having been spread throughout that team or even the entire league? A group of players that, as athletes, were up close with many others throughout the country. No one can 100% predict the future and that makes it really tough here in mid-May to know the answers.
In a perfect world, the president or some leader of medical health could declare a certain day as the day where everyone is cured and no one else will get or pass along the virus. Unfortunately, that is impossible.
These players have families and lives outside of sports that have to be thought of during this time. That may be hard for fans to accept because watching them perform is what they are needed for in fans’ lives. It’s not that fans don’t care about the livelihood of those involved in the leagues, but it simply isn’t as important as the on-field action.
In reality, health does come first even if it doesn’t feel like that as fans. Well, certain types of injuries matter. Things that keep players off the field.
Sure, there will be a ton of talk about finances. It’ll extend from there to the aforementioned health and wellness issues.
However, the safety of the players will be most important, most talked about and shall come to the forefront as the discussions and debates continue with each passing day.
Remember back in the day when the league started with a grand spring training and the regular season in early April? Those years were taken for granted along with so much else. Now, no one knows exactly how the MLB or any other league will work, or the true safety of its participants. It will certainly be interesting to see how everything works out in the coming weeks.
If the league succumbs to the pressures of the sporting and financial world and a person gets the illness. Well, it could turn into an absolute disaster that rocks the sporting world from top to bottom.
