Strike One: Brandon Beane said the quiet part out loud. If you want to be a member of the Buffalo Bills this season, get your COVID shots. Otherwise, you’ll get cut. Plain and simple.
“I think there’s going to be some incentives,” the Bills General Manager said recently during an interview. “If you have X number percent of your players and staff vaccinated, you can live normal…let’s just call it, back to the old days.”
The NFL has not made it mandatory for players to get the vaccine. No leagues have. But the NBA and others have loosened restrictions on teams that have an 85% confirmed vaccination rate among players and team personnel. The Bills are getting out in front of the issue, telling players that if you want to play for the defending AFC East Division champions this season, you’ll have to prove you’ve had those shots. Hopefully more professional and college sports teams will follow suit.
The fact that is still an issue is mystifying. What in the world is stopping every professional athlete from getting his or her COVID shots? How many games have to be postponed (looking at you, Colorado Avalanche…) before ALL the players realize that they have a duty to themselves, their families and teammates to get their shots. Geez.
The science is very clear. If we want to reach “herd immunity” in America and across the globe, we can only do that through vaccinations. The smartest people on the planet worked at warp speed to make this possible. Still, for some unknown reason, there are still naysayers. It makes NO sense at all. None.
But Beane hit the nail on the head during his interview. The key word is “incentive.”
There must be incentives for those who choose to remain ignorantly reluctant to getting the vaccine. And sports can play a big role in providing that incentive. Not just for those who want to play college or professional sports, but those who want to attend games, too.
Some MLB ballparks like Dodger Stadium and Oracle Park in San Francisco have already created special seating sections for those who can prove they’ve been vaccinated. These are the sections that are full at Dodgers and Giants games. Those kinds of seating sections will undoubtedly pop up at every ballpark across the country as teams (like the Colorado Rockies) who are desperate for ticket sale revenue realize that’s what it’s going to take to get all those butts back into currently vacant seats.
In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a big baseball games coming to Coors Field in early July. As of right now, no one knows how many fans will be able to enter the venue for the MLB All-Star game. Will it still be around 21,000 people all socially distanced? If that happens, very very few locals will be able to see the game in person. Those 21K seats will be filled by MLB sponsors and corporate folks. How’s that gonna go over?
The solution is pretty simple: Allow fans who can show proof of vaccination to buy tickets and attend the game. No ticket broker or scalper stuff. Treat it like and airline ticket. Purchaser who can prove he or she has had their COVID shots can use the ticket to enter the stadium.
How’s that for incentive?
All baseball and football teams should follow the same plan starting this summer. Everyone wants to see full stadiums. This is the way to accomplish that. Then the NBA and NHL can do the same starting in the fall. If we want to – as Brandon Beane says, get “back to the old days,” there’s one way to make it happen sooner rather than much later.
Strike Two: Bill Schmidt has a tremendous resume. The new interim General Manager of the Colorado Rockies has more than four decades of experience as a professional baseball scout and scouting director. While he didn’t play baseball professionally, he did do some coaching in the minor leagues, so he has worn a professional uniform. That’s something neither of his predecessors ever did.
What does all this mean for Schmidt’s immediate and longer term role with the Rockies?
Back in the day, many baseball GM’s were former players. My first GM was Al Rosen, who had a decorated playing career with the Cleveland Indians. But the current trend has gone away from old school types (although there are a few guys like former Rockie Jerry DiPoto in Seattle running teams) and more toward Ivy League educated numbers crunchers (like Jeff Bridich.) Schmidt seems to be a throwback of sorts, with his deep scouting background. Does that mean the Rockies are going back to the future?
Probably. In the early days of the team and especially since 2005 when Dick Monfort took over as the main guy in the front office, “draft and develop” was a Rockies mantra. And they did it well enough to make the World Series with a largely home grown team in 2007. They’d gotten away from that in recent years, and it cost them financially and on the field after a series of crummy big dollar free agent signings by Bridich.
For now, it stands to reason that Schmidt and the Rockies ownership will be focused on the upcoming MLB draft and the idea of developing prospects like Ryan Rolison and Michael Toglia – and other recent draft picks who are already in the Rockies system. Schmidt will very likely be tasked with trading Trevor Story and Jon Gray for financial reasons to try to acquire some additional young (i.e., minimum wage) talent. With the Rockies still trying to recover from the financial butt kicking administered by the pandemic, it only makes sense to dismiss any lingering thoughts about signing anyone to big new contracts – be it free agents or even their own guys – and start focusing on rebuilding a farm system that’s been anemic in recent years.
So long term, will Schmidt be a candidate for the full time gig?
Of course he will. Along with Zach Rosenthal and Zach Wilson he has to be among the betting favorites. Monfort loathes the idea of looking outside for input on the way the Rockies are run, and he hates the idea of firing people. So while they may do some outside interviews, it’s very unlikely they would hire anyone from outside who was looking to make substantial changes – even though those changes that are badly needed.
The question then is would Bill Schmidt, as the full time GM of the Rockies next fall, look to do things any differently? Would he embrace the building of a legitimate analytics department and 20th and Blake, for instance? Or is that too new school for an old dog like him?
If Schmidt could convince his boss to spend real money on a legitimate analytics department – one with more than two employees (who DON’T have to do the players laundry too) that could greatly enhance the team’s ability to draft, sign and develop future standout players of their own, then even an old school “holdover” from the Dan O’Dowd/Bridich regime could be a decent choice to turn things in the right direction.
Strike Three: The emergence of young stars like Fernando Tatis, Jr and others with exuberant home run celebrations, and the clamor to “Let the kids play,” is picking up supports. My friends Drew Goodman and Jeff Huson are now on the bandwagon. Let ‘em celebrate!
I get it. I understand that baseball needs to better market its stars, and fans like these kinds of “look at me” moments in sports. But before we turn MLB into WWE, let’s look at a couple important points. Yes, old school “get off my lawn” guys like me don’t like it much when a hitter hits a third inning home run and acts like he just went Joe Carter and homered to win the World Series. Yes, we understand that the old, unwritten rule about not showing up the other team is outdated and goes against what fans want to see. We get that personal “look at me” expression is all the rage in every team sports these days (which is not a good thing, btw.)
But more than worrying about being shown up, and the complete and utter failure to be able to “act like you’ve been there before” is the other side of the excessive celebration equation: What about the pitcher who punches a guy out? Is HE allowed to dance around, point to the sky and act like a jackass in the middle of the third inning of an undecided contest?
Pitcher Trevor Bauer is the other side of the Tatis coin. He’s the guy who strikes out a batter and does his Connor McGregor strut to the dugout. When I played, we had a dude named Denis, “Oil Can Boyd” who liked to demonstrate his awesomeness when he struck out a hitter in the middle of the game. He was reviled in opposing dugouts like ours. He’d fit in better today.
What Bauer and Tatis are doing is making it okay for both hitters and pitchers to thump their chests and bounce around and show off after they win a single individual battle during a game. There are at least 27 of those small battles within every game that gets played. So as this movement toward “letting the kids play” grows, should we start to expect 27 celebrations every night? More “I can top that” kind of stuff? Pitcher strikes out hitter and points his finger at him like it was a pistol and shoots him down in the first inning. Hitter gets a run scoring single in the fifth to tie the game. He thumps his chest and waves his arms in the air before
And they want baseball games to take less time to play? If the in-game celebration movement continues to grow, expect the average Major League Baseball game to start to take about 4 hours to play.
We “Old School” types are not against players having fun. But there is a time and a place for celebrating. The middle of a game that’s not yet been decided is not the place. What exactly are these guys celebrating anyway? Aren’t team sports celebrations supposed to be after you win?
That’s what bothers us the most. Not when Tatis hit a lead-off home run off Bauer and covered his eye while he slow trot around the bases. It’s that he did so well before the game had been won. Calling attention to yourself for an in-game accomplishment during a game that your team ultimately lost sends the wrong message. Celebrations aren’t for home runs they’re for victories.
I know, more “get off my lawn” stuff. I get that in-game celebrations are good for a guy’s Instagram account. They’re just not good for the game.