Will COVID-19 be the needle that finally bursts the sports bubble?

I would imagine it does.

Fauci's interviews are an example, though, of how badly the media mangles this and misunderstands the moment. The original LA times piece makes it clear that Fauci had a contextual caveat to his quote.


How long should baseball’s short season extend?

The players say November. The owners say October.

But, if the sole factor is minimizing risk for the novel coronavirus, Dr. Anthony Fauci said the major leagues would be wise to wrap up the postseason in September.

“If the question is time, I would try to keep it in the core summer months and end it not with the way we play the World Series, until the end of October when it’s cold,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a telephone interview with The Times on Tuesday. “I would avoid that.”

Fauci has generally been - with a few exceptions - very contextually specific about his comments. These statements are then flipped into absolutes, into edicts. And it's not fair to him.

The most egregious example remains the SI article from April 10 that treats some PHd from Emory like Moses coming down from the mountain. Not only did he predict there wouldn't be any sports at all until a vaccine, he said this about college football:

https://www.si.com/mlb/2020/04/10/sports-arent-coming-back-soon


“If people just decide to let it burn in most areas and we do lose a couple million people it’d probably be over by the fall. You’d have football. You’d also have two million dead people. And let’s talk about that number. We’re really bad at dealing with big numbers. That is a Super Bowl blown up by terrorists, killing every single person in the building, 24 times in six months. It’s 9/11 every day for 18 months. What freedoms have we given up, what wars have we fought, what blood have we shed, what money have we spent in the interest of stopping one more 9/11? This is 9/11 every day for 18 months.”

 

Irving not only led a discussion with close to 100 union members in a conference call, he also urged Nets players to skip the bubble recently in a separate group chat, the Daily News has learned. In that chat, Irving proposed that players could start their own league, according to a source.

 

There won’t be a second wave, just a continuation of this first wave.

Just the fact that COVID is thriving in 110° Arizona in June puts the kibosh on any idea that COVID is seasonal.

 

Kyrie obviously isn't the best person to pitch that, but, there have been some non-insane people who have suggested that as a potential outcome of the next NBA work stoppage, whenever it occurs. Namely that, unlike some of the other sports, if you want to start a rival league you really only need a certain amount of the top tier players to sign on. If LeBron, Kevin Durant, Steph Curry and a couple others want to start some new league, at a time when they're not under NBA contracts, some media entity - the traditional networks, or now, Amazon or Apple TV or YouTube (Google) - could throw massive money at it.

Of course, there are a couple hundred logistical things that make it a non-starter right now. (Off the top of my head, creating a management structure from scratch and dealing with the inevitable legal challenge from the NBA doesn't seem appealing for them.) The NBA seems to have relative labor peace, as compared to the NFL and especially MLB. But I think that's a least a credible threat when it comes to basketball, as opposed to the other sports.

 

So the players are going to pay Kyrie to be on the injured list?

 

A number of Nets players came out and said this is false.

 

So the NYDN is lying?

 

LeBron strikes me as the kind of guy who could start a league and get the kind of financial buy-in from American tech oligarchs to make it work.

Short of him, I dunno. The sport has never needed a player more than it needs him.

 

The wire rewrite of the LA Times story doesn't give context. LA Times story is paywalled. Did he discuss factors in minimizing risk other than time of year?

 

I don't know. The NYDN wasn't on the call. Those who were on the call say the NYDN got it wrong.

 

From this quote:

"This virus is one that keeps fooling us," Fauci said. "Under most circumstances -- but we don't know for sure here -- viruses do better when the weather starts to get colder and people start spending more time inside, as opposed to outside. The community has a greater chance of getting infected."

Is the extreme heat of Arizona an aggravating factor because it's so bloody hot that people aren't outdoors? I don't know. Never lived in Arizona. Only spent a week there once.
But the above quote suggests that temperature may have a secondary rather than a primary impact. Colder weather drives the virus because it drives people inside and not because it directly kills the virus?

 

Did not live in Phoenix but spent a lot of time there. There were nights when it was 105 at midnight. Lots of time spent indoors in AC. Nice part of living in Flag was that it just never got that hot there. 85 was fairly extreme.