When ‘flattening the curve’ has nothing to do with baseball

Updated Monday, March 30, 2020

LLANO, Texas — What does a sports blog do when there are no sports?  We’re not quite there yet. There’s still horse racing at a few tracks, albeit in front of empty stands.   But there’s not enough of these spectatorless sports to justify the daily posting of sports news. Some newspapers – what’s left of them – have eliminated their sports sections.  Basketball writers are covering City Hall.

How desperate can we be?  Is there any real point to watching virtual NASCAR?  I gave up on that when I saw Jimmie Johnson’s car going in the wrong direction, as if he thought the racetrack was a two-way street.

Our Trending feature was designed as a quick read on the American sports scene, with 3-8 links per day to the most important stories.  But now there aren’t enough of them. So in response to the coronavirus shutdown, Truex Sports Insider is limiting postings to Mondays and Fridays.   

I’m counting heavily on Derby Trail, which I believe is the most comprehensive report on the internet – or anywhere else – of the Kentucky Derby prep season.  I don’t list just 20-25 contenders, but more than 40. There are some 7 million horse racing fans scattered across the USA, and they’re not well served by print and digital media.

Alas, the Derby itself is precarious.  The Most Exciting Two Minutes in Sports has been postponed to Sept. 5.  This is very unsettling to horse trainers who set up the conditioning programs for peak performance on May 5.  They would have preferred running the Derby at the usual date, minus on-site spectators. But Churchill Downs decided a Kentucky Derby without fans and pageantry is no Derby at all.

Several prep races will be added so horses don’t go stale before Triple Crown racing eventually begins.  Meanwhile, two Grade 1 preps are lost: the Blue Grass Stakes and the Santa Anita Derby. 

Also missing – scratched from the Florida Derby — is 42-year-old Hall of Fame jockey Javier Castellano, who contracted coronavirus while with his family in New York.  He said he has no symptoms and did not have contact with anyone known to be infected.

We can write about athletes coping.  At last count, 14 pro basketball players have contracted coronavirus.  That rate of infection, if calculated for the rest of the population, extrapolates to about 11 million Americans.

As a group, NBA players are the most perfect physical specimens on the planet.  They’re young; they have nutritionists setting their diets; their bodies are fat-free.  I have to think their vulnerability to disease is far below the national average. It no longer seems far-fetched when epidemiologists – the experts on pandemics – say 100 million Americans may contract it when all the testing is done.    

So as we wait for social distancing to save us, we celebrate whatever we can.  Some of the uninfected athletes are doing great things, and let’s not forget it.  Zion Williamson is paying a month of salary for the workers at Smoothie King Center who are out of work with the arena dark.  New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees donated $5 million to provide lunches for children who are no longer being fed in school.

Major League Baseball is stepping up with each team contributing $1 million to the suddenly unemployed ballpark workers.  MLB is also shifting fabric normally used for making jerseys to the manufacturing of hospital gowns.  

Fortunately there’s the NFL with its free agency now and the college draft still scheduled for April 23-25.  There won’t be any spectators; it will be all-TV. It won’t be in Las Vegas, where there was supposed to be pageantry, the chosen ones in a boat, canal leading to the red carpet.  

More bad news came with disclosure by Saints head coach Sean Payton that he has the virus.  He thinks he may have contracted it during February’s traditional Mardi Gras, which brought tens of thousands of people face to face and elbow to elbow.

Among all the cancellations of sporting events, the most disturbing is the loss of Wimbledon.  The world’s greatest tennis tournament was scheduled – as always – for early July, which we’ve been assured will be too warm for coronavirus.  

The demise of Wimbledon has implications for the Major League Baseball season.  Forget Rob Manfred’s goal of games in May. Now July looks doubtful. There’s talk of a baseball season extending into the winter, which would be a travesty.  Can you imagine World Series games in New York in December?

Of course, sports is never without injury news, even in offseasons.  The Boston Red Sox have lost their best pitcher, Chris Sale, to Tommy John surgery.  This extreme elbow surgery means he’s out for more than a year. 

The same fate has been announced for New York Mets starter Noah Syndergaard.  Which turns out to be controversial. With New York being the epicenter of coronavirus, the team is criticized for using precious health-care resources on elective surgery.

But mostly the sports news is football, football, football.  I’m ready for endless reportage on Tua’s injury rehab and Justin Herbert’s comfort zone.  Unfortunately, news is limited because travel is restricted: athletes not visiting teams and their doctors.

The market flattened on Tom Brady, Greatest Of All Time.  Bill Belichick truly believes that just about any quarterback can win for his team as long as he’s coaching it.  He won with Matt Cassell, Jimmy Garoppolo, Jacoby Brissett.  

But does the NFL really believe Ryan Tannehill and Jimmy Garoppolo are more likely than Tom Brady to win the next Super Bowl?  

It’s exciting to think that Brady hooks up with the original Quarterback Whisperer Bruce Arians and three Pro Bowl receivers, and they go to the Super Bowl.  But how worked-up should we be over this? Suddenly the Super Bowl seems ephemeral. How long before the curve flattens and the pandemic runs its course?  

There’s not much to write about, and yet in a sense there is.  So I do like most everyone else, keep working, but cut back on everything.