What To Do About Baseball Brawls in a Time of Social Distancing?
One of the goals for Major League Baseball as it struggles to find ways for the sport to move forward in the age of COVID-19 coronavirus is to make every effort to keep everyone healthy.
The first step is keeping fans out of the ballparks. Another is to test players and staff as they enter these empty stadiums. Another is quarantining players, staff, umpires and necessary workers in hotels. Suggestions have been made that players sit far apart in the stands when not on the field rather than crowding into the dugout.
But there is a limit to how much regulations can keep players healthy and safe.
You can keep a center fielder far away from the right fielder when they’re both on the field, but the triangulation of the batter, the catcher and the umpire is going to lead to the shattering of the six-foot social distancing rules.
To be sure, baseball is the most socially distanced team game around. But there are frequent exceptions beyond the batter-catcher-umpire triad. The slide and tag at second base on a steal attempt is one example. The collision at the plate following a sacrifice fly or a bases-clearing double is another.
And then there’s what happened in Taipei, Taiwan the other day. A dispute about a the legality of a bat led to a benches-clearing brawl on the field. Former San Francisco Giants minor league pitcher Henry Sosa, now pitching for the Fubon Guardians, hit Kuo Yen-wen of the Rakuten Monkeys.
The four-team – it will expand to five teams in 2021 – Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) is the first baseball league to start up since COVID-19 shut down almost all sports around the globe. They play in stadiums with fans excluded.
Kuo had complained to the umpire that one of Sosa’s Guardian teammates was using an illegal bat. The umpire denied Kuo’s assertion, but Sosa took exception once he was on the mound and Kuo was in the batters’ box.
Just like that, about four dozen people were in close proximity. If that’s not inviting coronavirus infection, it’ll do.
That raises the question about similar brawls once baseball returns in North America, whenever it does. Tempers will fly from time to time; they always do. But this time there would be the specter of illness and perhaps even death accompanying all that shouting, pushing and shoving if one of those participants has been infected with COVID-19.
Brawls are already against the rules. That doesn’t prevent them from happening from time to time, and owners and players will have to either accept the risks or figure out a workaround.
Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3
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