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

Another good question. The AD at the two bigger schools (they're in the same district and share an AD) has talked often about keeping both the athletes and the school district safe. It's not hard to figure out that the latter is presumably from legal action if something goes wrong.
Our private schools have enough coaches at the moment to cover things.
If one of the kids catches COVID and they shut it down right away, I don't know how you could sue the school unless you could prove that the kid had no contact with anyone else who might have had the virus, anywhere along the line. If the kid stopped at a convenience store for a drink on the way home, maybe he caught it there. Maybe he got it from an asymptomatic parent that never knew they had it. Even if he caught it at practice and no one was showing signs of symptoms, how can you seriously hold the school at fault?
Honestly, the bigger concern among all of the coaches and ADs that I've talked to seems to be getting the players back in shape and acclimated to the heat after a three-month layoff. There was a kid in my state who collapsed and died during a workout the other day. Not sure of the cause, but pretty certain it had nothing to do with COVID-19.

 

Coronavirus outbreak at Phillies camp in Clearwater hits 5 players

 

This probably takes baseball off the table for 2020. Great that all training sites are in Arizona and Florida, our nation's trendiest plague spots.

 

Why would any league plan to finish or play out its season in Florida right now is beyond me. They are just begging their talent to get sick.

 

This is going to be the thing that gets both sides off the hook. There is no deal because there should not be a deal.

 

No clue why it would. People are going to get this thing and they will largely deal with it, recover and move on with life.

The level of shame/fear/whatever over testing positive...it's so much of a moral thing. People are acting like it makes you a bad person to have gotten it, that you could have killed someone or, worse, secretly set in motion your own death. COVID is being treated like it's somehow aware and it's punishing wrongdoers.

Millionaire athletes are the things we can protect. What would sidelining them solve? Play without fans! But play.

 

Man, you live in a strange world that I don't recognize at all.

 

You should ignore me then.

 

The shame is not cast on those who test positive; it is deservedly cast on Trumpist governors and others who allowed the conditions that caused the positive test count to skyrocket.
Again, we get back to one core tenet: How much suffering are we going to tolerate? There is risk in anything in participatory sports. If you play baseball, you might suffer an elbow injury that ruins your career. This is an additional risk heaped upon others, and it doesn't have to be tolerated. If you're the union leadership or even the rank and file, how many of your brethren are you willing to see hospitalized? While the overwhelming majority of these positive cases will be trivial, some people will get sick if we proceed. That's almost a certainty. What's the threshold? That's the question that players on the professional level and coaches and administrators on the amateur level will have to answer.
I miss baseball and all sports. I fear that they will all be off the table for several more months. It would really suck if college basketball were to go away. And we shouldn't rush to cancel everything right away without proper examination of the context.
But in the specific case of baseball, they've been bickering to the point where anything that can be salvaged may not be worth the trouble. The Florida outbreaks, which have occurred in a Florida region well known for throwing caution and masks to the winds, should at least compel the parties to reconsider Spring Training 2.0 and regular-season game sites.