Worst cases

And now the inner skeptic is out of his box again, and he is telling me he was right. He is telling me it was a fool's notion to think baseball could blithely carry on its business in the middle of a pandemic, all those teams jetting all over the country just like always.

I hate the skeptic, that dour old pessimist. I wish I were in an airplane so I could push him out of it. I wish I were more proficient with poison darts. Something.

Because we barely made it through one weekend of baseball's 2020 startup, and everything the skeptic feared has happened. One team, the Marlins, had an outbreak of the Bastard Plague. Half their squad has shown red for it.

Which means they had to postpone their opening home stand against the Orioles and remain in Philadelphia, where they'd just played the Phillies. Which means the Phillies in had to postpone their game against the Yankees because they'd been in contact with the Marlins.

And so the dominoes go down, one by one by one. And so the skeptic says this is exactly what he feared would happen, that one team would have an outbreak and force other teams to stop and get tested and, bingo, the whole deal slides off the rails.

Rob Manfred says that's not gonna happen, that protocols are in place to keep everything humming along, but right now that just sounds like some fine whistling past the boneyard. Because even if protocols are in place -- even if every team has a pool of extra players in case what's happened to the Marlins happens to them -- how does that in itself not warp the season? How do you get a true measure of who's who if half the teams wind up fielding what amounts to minor-league nines?

I'm not saying that's going to happen. I'm also not saying the Marlins weren't a de facto minor-league team to begin with, no matter who they put out there.

But if 30 games in we're watching Ratso Rizzo instead of Anthony Rizzo, how do you take it seriously? How does the season not go from Field of Dreams to Three Rings of Fun, with a calliope keeping accompaniment in the background?

Oh, the skeptic is out his box, all right. He is loose in the streets and I can't catch him.

Because now I'm looking ahead, and I'm thinking if baseball can't get through four days without an outbreak, what's gonna happen when NFL teams start jetting all over America? How does college football make it work with their conferences that sprawl across half the country and their bubble-proof campuses?

At least in baseball players can social distance to an extent, because of the nature of the game. Football players, because of the nature of their game, spend three hours breathing on one another. What chance does the latter have, if the former has already seen an outbreak?

I hate these thoughts. I hate the skeptic who puts them in my head. But how do you stop them, at this point?

Maybe a long walk off a short plank. Maybe that would work.

I hear the skeptic can't swim, after all.