THE GAMES MUST GO ON

IN ANY OTHER baseball season, two Cleveland Indians pitchers hitting the bars in Chicago after a Saturday night game wouldn’t be news. It wouldn’t cause a minor scandal within the team’s clubhouse, and it certainly wouldn’t result in the two offending players being immediately removed from the Indians’ roster.

But that’s exactly what happened after Mike Clevinger and Zach Plesac—two-fifths of Cleveland’s excellent starting pitching rotation—got caught trying to sneak back into their hotel in the early morning hours of August 8. Their teammates were so upset that they threatened to opt out of the rest of the season if the two pitchers were allowed to remain with the team, according to media reports. Facing a clubhouse revolt, Cleveland’s front office made the decision to “option” both players off the major league roster for 10 days—a maneuver that would typically mean a player was demoted to the minor leagues, if only there were minor leagues this year.

Sports are back! Clearly, however, things are still far from normal.

There’s no playbook for how to conduct professional athletic events in the midst of a pandemic. The guidelines that we’ve all learned to follow in recent months are only so helpful—good luck playing any team sport while maintaining six feet of social distance from your opponents on the field, court, or rink and your teammates in the locker room.

In that regard, bringing the games back before the pandemic dissipated was, like everything else we do these days, not about eliminating risk but about mitigating it. Different leagues have responded in different ways, and their various choices have relied on a combination of formal strategies shaped by economic and political considerations unique to each sport and informal coping mechanisms—like Cleveland’s ballplayers policing one another’s behavior and objecting when the actions of one