Bread and Circuses
Did a spectator in the Colosseum ever turn to his fellow plebeian and ask if he was the only one who found it a little morally dubious watching the lions tear the gladiators limb from limb?
I would hope.
Eventually, we as a species came to an agreement: enough with the gladiators. Humans are no longer placed in lion enclosures and told to fight for their lives to entertain the masses. Progress.
Yet modern sports still present ethical dilemmas that mirror that of the aforementioned plebe.
When an unsuspecting wide receiver gets laid out in the open field and loses consciousness before hitting the ground, the networks signal to us the seriousness of the moment by cutting to commercial with solemn piano music, in stark contrast to the normally bombastic soundtrack.
The moment of impact, the hushed crowd, the prayer circles—this sequence feels lengthy. But it's typically not more than a matter of minutes until play resumes. What follows is less raucous than the pre-injury competition, but remains a game nonetheless. Successes are celebrated. Miscues derided. A winner, a loser. The standings fluctuate. The questions that briefly rattled around in your brain—How long will they be in the hospital? Are they going to walk again? Why do I watch this stuff?—have long receded by the time you move on to something else.
The coronavirus has reshuffled the deck.
The pandemic has cast into stark relief the value of human life. We've (rightly) altered our day-to-day behavior to an unprecedented degree for the purpose of helping others. Specifically, we've done so for the purpose of keeping others alive. Of sparing fellow humans from the unique and miserable suffering this virus carries with it.
This is an unambiguously good thing. It's required collective selflessness on a global scale, and the countries that have done "well" with it are those that have been most willing to sacrifice certain comforts (mass gatherings, unmasked faces, etc.).
But while the central premise of our response to the coronavirus has been to do whatever it takes to minimize human suffering—is the same true of professional sports, an industry that has always attempted to sidestep questions of morality and the human cost of playing these games?
Thus far, the answer has been league-dependent. The NBA and NHL have consigned their players to bubbles (a "campus", according to Adam Silver's stilted corporate nomenclature). The results, through much of the playoffs, have been impressive. The caliber of competition remains high, fans or not. The games are different, but recognizable. Crucially, I don't get the sense that players or team staff are risking their lives for the sake of my entertainment.
Baseball has been a different story.
The idiocy of league's shambolic reopening plan has been on full display since early-on, as a full third of the league saw games postponed while the league weathered multiple COVID-19 outbreaks. While many players and staffers remain asymptomatic and most will avoid hospitalization or worse, it's critical to remember that "most will avoid hospitalization" is one notch above "most will avoid death" in terms of thresholds for success.
Football seems destined for a similar fate. As various league personnel have tested positive for COVID-19, mention of a bubble setup remains sparse and halfhearted. The NFL seems committed to sticking its head in the sand and learning nothing from the abject failures of MLB's restart.
By requiring teams to travel across a country deep in the throes of a deadly pandemic just to keep us entertained, fans of the bubble-less leagues are left to ponder questions similar to those of the Colosseum attendees. Absent a change in direction towards a more humane restart plan, consuming baseball and football these days feels akin to hoping the lions take it easy on the gladiators.