How Optimistic Are You That the Season Will Be Played? (Round 3)
Since the end of March, we’ve been tracking reader sentiment regarding the potential for an upcoming season. It’s been two weeks since the last round of polling, so here are the questions again; these are the same as our initial set. Hopefully your answers will reveal how sentiment has changed (or not) over time.
Thank you for your time and assistance. We will report back with the results.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
I’m curious to see how these results shift with time.
It went from “no season” 28% (first vote) to 31% (second vote) to now 38%
That numbers is fluid, I saw 31% when I did it.
Still no season.
It was no games in March, no games two weeks ago, it’s no games now. No games! It’s a real bummer, but MLB is not going to find the means to play a season.
My God do we need more tests before this is even remotely possible. Where are the tests!?
That is a very real possibility. You should vote, to officially log your opinion.
The country is realizing that if we are going to wait until there is no threat from the virus whatsoever then the entire fabric of American life is going to unravel. The signs are all around us already and people are willing to take more risk now than they were a month ago to resume some semblance of what we had before. The fact that COVID-19, while very contagious and easily transmitted does not appear to as dangerous as the terrible Spanish Flu of 1918. The odds of surviving a case of COVID-19 are quite good, apart from those who are predisposed to suffering serious complications. The web surrounding the other ramifications of the lockdown is very complex but it has to be taken into account as well. I am 78 and in the target group but in the last 4 weeks I have been unable to see my oncologist, my cardiologist, my gastro-enterolgist, and my dermatologist in person. As a PGA Member for over 50 years I spent many hours on the course and the teaching tee and was diagnosed in 2006 with a malignant melanoma. Every time I see the doctor who caught it in the nick of time I remember to thank him. How can a dermatologist diagnose a skin cancer when he can’t see it, up close and personal? My point is that it seems that as many people are going to suffer from other maladies, certainly some fatal, if the country continues on the present course. When the choices are a rock and a hard place, it looks like the rock has been shown to have problems that perhaps were not foreseen adequately by those making the decisions and it is now time to see if the hard place is just a little bit softer. For that reason I think that there will be an all-out effort to cobble some type of season together. As to what it might look like, who cares!!! Even I have seen enough of the highlights of Big Papi’s career.
OK, so now I have to ask: What is your name? I used to follow the PGA. I went to the 1970 Masters that Billy Casper won. My friend and I were in college and had only one badge, so we had to swap it out. Naturally, I got caught. But made it back in anyway.
There is a difference between Professional Golfers and Golf Professionals. You, and a large number of others, confuse the PGA of America with the PGA Tour. That is separate from the PGA of America, of which I am a proud member of the Half-Century Club.. We are the Golf Professionals at the thousands of public and private courses throughout our country. The men and women who run the Pro Shop, the person who gives the lessons and organizes the club tournaments. I was a pretty good player and when asked I always said I was a Triple-A caliber player who was lucky enough to get my equivalent of a September call-up and play in several tour events but do not confuse the club pro with the touring pro.
I’m interested to know what you are basing this on because most (all?) polls show pretty much the exact opposite.
-A politico poll found that 81% of respondents think its un safe to ease restrictions in May.
-A Washington post poll found 65% of respondents think it will be june or later until its safe to gather in groups of 10 or more.
-An Axios poll found a whopping 92% of respondents saying they were practicing social distancing.
Those things could not be farther apart from what you are claiming.
My guess – and it’s only a guess – is he is referring to the high-profile protests by a very vocal minority at various state capitals. Are *some* people willing to take more risk? Certainly. Are the majority? It seems not.
I’ll speak for myself, but a month ago it was easy to follow all the social distancing guidelines. A month in, and I’m kind over it – especially since at this point there doesn’t seem to be any real end to it.
Something tells me that oncology clinics, if they are even closed, are going to be first things to reopen. I think the ones around me are still open, and the dermatologists have rescheduled many appointments but not all–if others closed down completely for four weeks that seems to be a mistake.
Somewhere between 67%-80% of the country supports things staying closed until it’s safe again.
That this is less deadly than the Spanish Flu is a bit…well, that’s a pretty distant bar to clear. It had a mortality rate of over 2%. You can come in a bit under that and still have millions of people die.
Ultimately, this is mostly being done because there is a really strong aversion to the rationing of care. Nobody wants to be in a situation where they have to let just people die because they don’t have enough ventilators/doctors. We had some of that in NYC a couple weeks ago.
I happen to be torn between the right course of action. There is no right answer. The only thing before us is which is worse. I read the 67%-80% number and if there was a date, any date, that could definitely be shown to be when we could feel safe then these actions would not be tried. But there is no Nostradamus to tell us that date. Can anyone tell me what happens if this lingers and the country continues to be paralyzed? What will the country look like if economic activity virtually ceases for even only a year? The mental issues alone are too horrifying to contemplate, The Spanish Flu was much more virulent. It killed perfectly healthy young people in hours. While COVID-19 is a frightening menace and cannot be considered anything less, it appears to have a much lower mortality rate, except among old and compromised people. We, as a nation, are much more capable of facing this unseen enemy than we were in 1918 and that is why these experiments are being tried Make no mistake about it, that is what they are, clearly experiments, in Georgia and a couple of other states to see if it is possible not to wait, for what will feel like forever, before the nation can begin to return to something resembling life as we knew it. The risk is huge, let me put that in capitals, HUGE, but it is clear that going on with no end that can be clearly discerned has forced action that I don’t think anybody wants to take but these people see no other way forward. We can only wait and hope.
That is alot of words to say absolutely nothing lol.
The right thing to do is to invoke the DPA and do whatever else it takes to produce literally everything needed to conduct millions of tests per day. Actually, the right thing to do was to do that 1-2 months ago, because there are states that could start lifting restrictions as early as some point in May with a viable test and trace strategy. But there are only going to be about 5 states, I think all in the northeast, that are going to be ready to do that, and maybe not even until June.
I think there’s misconception that if we lift restrictions that the economy will start to resemble normal. That’s just not going to happen. If we’re talking about reopening oncology clinics (which probably never should have been closed to start with) that’s a different story than movie theaters, which are going to remain empty no matter what. And if people did start acting like normal, the hospital system would quickly become overwhelmed. Life is not going to be normal with people dying in large numbers.
The only ways things will start to resemble normal is with testing. It won’t be “real normal”–but it will be a whole lot closer than this.
Millions of tests a day is beyond current possible capacity and without effective contact tracing minimally effective. For those who want to remain in “shelter in place” indefinitely I suspect some will change when their livelihood becomes threatened. I’m fortunate to be able to work remotely, I’m in a high COVID area, but I understand not everyone is in the same situation I am. I do find it interesting that some find Shelter in Place less of an imposition on personal liberty than enforcing quarantining for COVID positives and using cell phone technology to contact trace. Hopefully one thing we can all agree upon is a natural disease progression turn for the better, a treatment breakthrough and baseball in some relatively safe form in 2020. Stay safe.
I only partly understand this argument. Without a dramatic increase in the number of tests we can run a day–we’re running under 150K right now, and the most conservative estimates I’ve seen say we need a number 4 or 5 times that–surveillance is impossible, much less test and trace. The “Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience” says that we need 5 million tests a day *including* test-trace-isolation. I do agree that it is currently out of reach, but mostly because we don’t have the political will to set up that infrastructure.
With respect to staying at home–yes, things are bad for a lot of workers right now. But the idea that we’re just going to all go back to work right now and that everything will go back to normal is wrong, and I think most people intuitively understand that. Nobody is flying for a while, nobody is going to restaurants or theaters, lots of people are going to be avoiding the Apple Store and Macy’s and other places like that (many will, maybe even a majority, but it’s not going to be pretty). And this is before we start talking about the likelihood that coronavirus shuts down workplaces, which it absolutely will. And before we consider that for some reasons (which make some sense from a public health perspective but zero from an economic perspective) K-12 schools seem like they’ll be the last to open, which is going to crush actual real-world productivity and keep many people from going back to work.
The best thing to do is to get the virus under control. The shutdown doesn’t help, but the virus is the problem and what is the primary driver of all of this.
As someone who has been working throughout this entire ordeal I’m very very skeptical of this sentiment. Our store has seen pretty much zero drop in traffic and are in fact beating our sales from the same period last year (and thats despite us limiting the amount of customers allowed in at once AND shortening our hours).
Sure, the hardest hit places you might see people more hesitant but there is huge parts of the country where Covid19 is more a news story than a reality.
I hope I’m wrong but my experience so far say’s i’m not.
This probably depends a lot on what you’re selling, right? And also probably what state you’re in. The surveys are showing that people are not excited to go back out there anytime soon–not to work, not to fly, not to eat out. Retail is probably going to depend a bit.
I work at a hardware store. We are allowed to be open because a small % of product we sell is theoretically “essential”. In reality we sell pretty much nothing essential and 99% of people are not buying anything remotely essential.
Like I said, I hope I’m wrong but literally everyday for the past month there has been a lineup outside of people waiting to come in and our sales are through the roof.
Spanish Flu killed a lot of people because a) soldiers got it in Europe and spread it all over the world when the war ended, and b) people mostly didn’t practice social distancing, or at least not at the level that was needed.
Paragraphs are your friend. Say hello to them.
You’re creating a false dilemma: stay locked down forever or open now. I don’t know anyone who thinks we should stay in lockdown forever.
The question is, should we open now, in mid-May, or later, like June or July?
Very few medical professionals think we should open now.
Well very few of those calling for easing are getting their messages spread on mainstream outlets. But there are many qualified professionals who are questioning things. I too am still dubious of most of the extreme measures that have been ruling the world over the the last 2 months. For certain, this is uncharted territory, and all we have are theories. There’s no definitive proof of many things that people seem to have quickly taken for granted after the incessant drumbeat of media repetition; including no proof:
— that most of us haven’t already been ‘infected’ and recovered without much notice, thus allowing our natural immune systems to develop antibodies (you know, how humans evolved and thrived for hundreds of thousands of years until the last century– a method that vaccines tried to mimic, with so far mixed results) ;
— of the reliability of test results, which so far have been notoriously inaccurate
— or of even the concept of social distancing itself. Past (ignored) research shows that several of the top conditions of keeping our immune systems firing on all cylinders are being denied us. These include regular sunlight (we are far more like plants in this way than we like to acknowledge!); free flow of oxygen, which can be inhibited unhealthily by erring too far on the side of caution (masking up in a car or while doing exercise is particularly irrational); a positive outlook, which many of us agree is a key factor in avoiding major illness; which leads directly to what’s being especially under-valued– interacting with other people. We are social creatures! And it’s Spring. It’s supposed to mean renewal!
Apart from a few hotspots like NY where extreme caution needs to last awhile, why not start slowly and try gradual easing in several states that have so far not had their hospital infrastructure at all debilitated. Does not the scientific method demand a control group?
The most frustrating part of this poll is that polling percentages don’t line up across questions. For example, why aren’t the percentages for “no” and “0” in questions about any 2020 season and games played in 2020 the same? Why aren’t you people consistent across questions?!
Agree or just take zero out of the rest of the questions and say ‘if baseball is played, then how many…’
short answer: question framing changes response as people change their heuristic to calculate the probability.
Long answer: Peterson and Beach 1968
My best guess is that it has more to do with the denominators being different — for example, that some of the folks who marked “no season” for the first question didn’t answer other questions in the poll — than individuals giving contradictory responses.
It’s simple: some people don’t answer every question.
Well, the last question gives no answer for the no season people, for one thing.
I guessed we’ll have a season but no playoffs, because I think the season will be aborted when the second wave of the epidemic hits. That seems to be a minority view, but it could explain why there are a few more “no season” votes on the playoffs question than the one immediately before it.
On the last question, I would have voted for- same number of rounds and teams, but shorter series in DLS and CLS rounds.
Fauci came out and said he thought there could be baseball with no fans at some point in July, but I’m not sure how that is going to work. You need tests in order to do anything aside from the bare minimum and exactly who is going to build it?
I’m curious whether Fauci was thinking about it from a public health perspective or a baseball perspective, though. From a public health perspective, I’m sure he’s correct. Baseball doesn’t need *that* many people, and with reasonable testing and precautions you could probably make a baseball game less risky for the people involved than going to the grocery store. In terms of avoiding health risks and preventing the spread of the disease, that’s a huge win.
In terms of playing a baseball season, that’s not even close to enough. All of those precautions can bring the risk of somebody getting the virus very low, and the risk of transmitting it in the course of a baseball game to even lower. But very low is not zero. And it will only take one or two positive tests to derail the whole season, because games have to stop if somebody tests positive.
You can play a legitimate baseball season of 80 games in empty stadiums. It would be strange, but at the end of the year you’d crown a champion and that team would fly a legitimate banner. But if the Yankees play 80 games and the Rays have a better winning percentage but in only 55 games because of a couple positive tests, and the Dodgers have to quarantine and forfeit the World Series because a clubhouse attendant gets sick… at that point, it’s just an exhibition season.
I’m not really encouraged by the resumption of baseball in Taiwan and Korea, either. Those countries, by virtue of a very strong public health response, have far fewer cases than the U.S. They have a legitimate shot of getting through a season without losing games. For reasons, the virus is much more widespread in the U.S. and we don’t even really know how widespread it is. IMO, it’s a near certainty that positive tests of players or people in contact with them would end up affecting the season.
There are some constant assumptions that are not necessarily facts that keep popping up. The assumption is that if a player tests positive then the whole team has to shut down for 2 weeks. If that assumption is true then it is pointless to even try to have a season. If you are going to shut it down with one positive test, forget it, because you will get positives at some point.
You can only open the season if there are reasons to believe that you do not have to shut it down with a positive test. What are those reasons? I don’t know. They would probably include fast and accurate testing, and also prerequisite testing to find players that are already immune.
There would/should also be recommendations in place that anybody over 60 just should not take part. Managers, coaches, umps over 60, don’t do it (unless they have tested as already immune).
I’m not trying to convince all of you that there will be baseball, or that the disease isn’t terrible. Just pointing out the logistics cannot include one positive test shutting everything down. Again if that is the rule, don’t even try.
The problem is that there won’t be just one positive test. If one player tests positive it’s almost certain others on his team will as well because of how highly transmissible it is. We know Rudy Gobert directly infected a teammate (Donovan Mitchell) and teams across all leagues have seen multiple of its players test positive (Nets, Lakers, 76ers, Colorado Avalanche, Ottawa Senators, Juventus have all had 2 or more players test positive).
So the question becomes A) how long do you have to delay games to test and trace everyone in the event of a positive and B) what do you do if a team or multiple teams lose like half it’s starting nine to positives? Unfortunately I don’t think any of the answers, at least right now, lead me to to believe baseball can be played.
Right. But if we can’t stomach one positive test, then why are we even discussing playing baseball?
Shirtless George Brett has some good points here, but I think in the bigger picture, the question is: What *do* you do when someone tests positive? The problem is that no one has come up with a viable approach. If you have enough rapid tests, then you could test everyone and isolate them when they test positive, but we’re somewhere between five months and a new executive branch away from having enough tests where that is even remotely possible.
I’m actually more or less with you, but from a different perspective–the question of “what do you do when a player tests positive” is the big unanswered question in this whole scenario. Nobody, and I mean nobody, has come up with an answer that isn’t “shut down a whole team when someone comes up positive.” Until someone figures that out, it’s not happening.
We *do* have a viable approach for when you test positive.
I said baseball won’t be played. While I feel strongly that it shouldn’t, (because it will not be safe for players and everyone they come in contact with), I’m only 60% confident it won’t.
I want to see baseball this year as much as anyone, but i just can’t get past the logistics that would need to be implemented for even an 80-game season to happen.
Could be wrong about this but did I read the PGA is requesting 1 MILLION tests in order to start back up again? Which would equate to ~25% of our current capacity. Now i am sure that manufacturing will ramp up by June (hopefully!) but even then the amount of staff it takes to manage a golfing event is marginal compared to how many people it would take to coordinate 30 teams over a few months-period. I read a wonderful article on year just a few weeks ago that reaffirmed this thought process.
The effort required to enable baseball with this disease in play is exponentially more complicated, and now you have the owners saying players would need to take a pay cut because of lack of fans? I just don’t see a reasonable solution. I want to be wrong, so so badly. But I just don’t see it happening.
It’s not just the volume of tests, it’s the quality of the tests and the turnaround time. There are a lot of reports of false negatives from the current tests, generally those are considered a less serious error than a false positive, but NOT when you are testing proactively, there you’d rather have false positives than false negatives. You’d rather prevent a healthy golfer from playing in error, than allowing a sick golfer to play in error. Also, if it takes a couple of days to get results the tests are useless for the purposes of ensuring that everyone participating in a sporting event is free of COVID-19. My impression is we are very far away from being at a point where we could effectively test athletes prior to a competition.
And even if they did find a way to make it work, a single player testing positive would likely totally derail the whole effort. they would have to test, trace and quarantine every other player that the positive player had contact with. In a league that is presumably playing a condensed schedule full of double headers and multiple teams are sharing the same facilities, that would be a nightmare and probably grind everything to a halt again. And lets be honest, someone would test positive at some point. Its almost a certainty.
I’m with you, I want baseball to come back but it just seems like a logistical impossibility and not worth it.
Maybe a clearer question to ask would be how many games will be played with fans as opposed to without fans.
Call me too optimistic, but that case in CA proving unchecked community spread a month before it was noticed has seriously buoyed my hopes. We’ll have to wait for more antibody tests – if this shows a hospitalization rate of less than .1% and an infection rate above 5%, things will look considerably brighter. Games in mid June! With fans! (Well, probably not, but as long as there are outs left, there’s hope regardless of the deficit.)
This is what I would like to see more communities try out in cautious way. Let’s have a few smaller areas — that have not had new cases in at least a couple weeks — slowly open up. Of course, the compromised and elderly are still to remain in place. But more controlled experimentation like this can teach us far faster than a vast experiment with no control group.
It comes down to money. MLBPA doesn’t want to get paid less per game; the owners would get nowhere the normal per-game revenue. Hence, no season.
As a fan, I’m fine with that. Focus on next year rather than some pseudo-season that will not matter to history.
But the owners are far more worried about the TV money. No games means they would have to pay it all back.
I also don’t mean to be a Debbie Downer, but there is no guarantee we will be ready for a full season next year, either.
The season will be able to start when the media stops forcing fear down everyones throats and we are able to start moving on.
Good luck with that.
Other than hoping for hurricanes, this is the only story the media’s got between now and the election. No way they stop the fearmongering.
We literally locked down the entire world and still 40,000+ (and counting) Americans have died in essentially 2 months. But yeah, fear mongering.
idiots.
And you trust those numbers? How many people have died from something else, but it has been labeled with COVID? Hard to trust anyone with this when everyone seems to have an angle they are taking for how they will benefit. Its sad.
I think it actually goes the other way, but your suspicion is normally a good question to ask against the status quo.
Based on anecdotes, it’s my understanding that some “normal” causes of death such as heart attack, stroke — particularly those who are dying at home — are seeing an increase. Consequently, the number of deaths due to COVID-19 might actually be higher than has been reported.
Here is one article that speaks to this idea:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/coronavirus-death-toll-americans-are-almost-certainly-dying-of-covid-19-but-being-left-out-of-the-official-count/2020/04/05/71d67982-747e-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html
Agree to disagree on that point. But have a look https://youtu.be/zYUExBc1ijU
And here is a decent analysis of the death tally fudging process:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS6EoyA7ZlU
If you just flat out refuse to believe reliable objective sources (like Johns Hopkins) then there is really no discussion to be had. Are they 100% accurate, no. Even they will tell you that. Its incredibly hard to be 100% accurate when widespread testing is not even happening. But the idea that its probably significantly less is absurd. As imRags points out, its much more likely to be the opposite. So If that is the logic you are using then, well, literally nothing is real. I could deny that 2+2 = 4 for the same reason.
But really all you and your ilk are doing is moving the goal posts. First it was “the flu kills 60,000 per year! This is no big deal.” Now that you cant use that idiotic talking point anymore because covid has pretty much surpassed that in 2 months you are going with “well those numbers arent real anyway.”
I’m truly baffled as to how someone with your mindset would find themselves on fangraphs, of all places.
One of my thoughts on all this is that it takes over a month (at best) to arrange a single event where 30k+ are going to attend. (Funerals seem like an exception to this) Arranging a series of events like a season of baseball games would definitely take longer. I mean, it’s fair to say that they can play one game in July, but then follow it up with 99 more, to complete a season? I have my doubts when at this point there isn’t anything resembling a coherent plan to even play that one game in July.