Padecky: Baseball is full of habits that aren’t safe during the pandemic

With a bit of examination and understanding, it’s not difficult to see why baseball players are quite comfortable with spitting, slapping, bumping, grinding, hugging, screaming, high-fiving, low-fiving and any another other action you can think of that I have not.

As Major League Baseball is hurtling at the speed of light toward the cancellation of what they want us to believe is a “season,” the players are the target of this shutdown. “Irresponsible,” “arrogant,” “brainless” are just a few of the choice adjectives being tossed around like crippling manhole covers. Hit a player with one of these lead weights, it is said, and that’ll knock some sense in them. That sentence is as clueless as its intended target.

Baseball is a game of contact, and that statement has nothing to do with catching, throwing or hitting that little round thing. The players who play it are under a social contract, one they never signed but understood instinctively and accepted readily and gladly.

Baseball players gather at a clubhouse and that should tell you something right there. They are not in a locker room like the NFL or NBA. A locker room feels antiseptic compared to a clubhouse, where all manner of infantile horseplay and adolescent pranks come off as a high art and social glue. It’s what has to happen in MLB when you report in February and other than the All-Star Game you see the same faces and light the same hotfoots for nine months if you get lucky and make it to the World Series.

It leads to behaviors that thankfully are contained to a clubhouse, behaviors that even puzzle the participants. There is a behavior you’ll never see, say, at a bank.

“We slap players on the butt all the time and I don’t know why we do that,” said John Goelz, baseball coach at Sonoma State. “We are conditioned to do that and I don’t know how it started. But a guy hits a triple and the third base coach greets him with a slap on the ass. Why? I have no idea.”

The players know COVID-19 is a killer. They know social distancing. They know COVID likes all humans, even young, strapping, physically gifted baseball players. The players have handheld devices that informed them Monday 13 members of the St. Louis Cardinals have tested positive. They know the Marlins and the Phillies have played just three games this “season.” They know 19 games already have to be made up.

They also probably know if it were 13 New York Yankees who had tested positive the season already is over. The sport needs its marquee team in the mix of this crazy-quilt season that is severely testing fan loyalty. If it were 13 Los Angeles Dodgers, the season might last until the end of this week.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, of course, will blame the players for the mess. “I am not a quitter,” Manfred said. What a tough guy he is, in his ninth floor office in Manhattan. He’s hanging tough behind those walls. I’m sure he has a nice view of the world he imagines. I’m also sure he’s waiting for the owners to tell him what to do next.

I’m also pretty sure he didn’t approve what Matt Olson did on July 24, when the A’s first baseman hit a walk-off grand slam to beat the Angels. By the time he made it to home plate, he already slapped palms of his first- and third-base coaches. At home plate Olson was mobbed like a conquering hero.

Which leads to an obvious but necessary question.

“What else were they supposed to do?” Goelz asked.

Maybe everyone could stand six feet away and say quietly — NO SCREAMING by the way — “We are so proud of you ... I’m sure glad you playing for us ... Want some hand sanitizer?”

To believe those could be the responses Olson would get in this COVID world makes the Tooth Fairy believable. Players restraining themselves at that moment could only happen if they were in handcuffs and chained to a stadium seat. Otherwise they would succumb to a detailed pattern of behavior that might as well be included in their DNA strand.

“Let’s talk about what happens for a day game,” Goelz began of his SSU team. “We get to the park around 8:30 a.m. We take BP (batting practice at 10). Game is at one. In college we play a lot of weekend doubleheaders. We might get off the field at 8. Then we come back the next morning and do it all over again.

“What sport does that?”

Baseball needs physical contact to express itself. It is fair to say there are many moments of inactivity in the game. Watching a batter swing and miss is an isolated, singular action that can create this limiting emotional response in a teammate — “Oh darn it!”

So when it happened, when Olson made that contact, bells and whistles went off. Well-conditioned and toned 20-somethings who have spent nine innings in a dugout spring to the field as if catapulted.

How can I blame them? Should you? Of course the rational point can be made. Stop the spread fellas. Stay apart. Makes total epidemiological sense. But the sport already is played in vacuous sound chamber. Clubs can pipe in music but after the second or third fake cheer echoes through any empty stadium, the music is as annoying as a dog scratching itself. Enough already Fido. Stop it, you say to yourself.

So when players hug or slap or cheer or fist-bump, we exhale and are reminded we are not watching a video game. If you’re 26 as Olson is, you are well-conditioned to the game’s behaviors. If he started playing the game at 10, Olson has 16 years of slapping and bumping and grinding.

Sure, Olson could stop all of a sudden. He could respect and acknowledge the danger posed by the virus. He could keep his emotions and his hands to himself. But he could admit he’s having a tough time breaking a bad habit. In that Olson should take solace. He’s not the first American struggling with a bad habit.

As early at the 1940s and the 1950s, research revealed tobacco use was linked to cancer. Surgeon general warnings began to appear on cigarette packs. Heart-rending video testimonials of those suffering made the effects of tobacco use as real and disquieting as any of us would care to see.

Yet, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention claims today 40 million Americans still smoke and that every year nearly a half-million die prematurely of smoking and exposure to second-hand smoke. Forty million Americans know better. This bad habit, of course, is different in origin and content than observing COVID health protocols. But the influence of a bad habit — be smoking, alcohol, overeating, et al — can damage or kill.

What’s different about this baseball bad habit is this: It wasn’t a bad habit six months ago. It was part of the game. It is a sport of cherished video clips — Yogi Berra jumping into the arms of Don Larsen after Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series.

Yogi certainly wasn’t practicing social distancing. Neither was Olson’s teammates. Of course we wish they could. Or would. We wish for a lot of things these days. I wish the baseball season wasn’t going to be cancelled. But I still have hope. I know where it can be played, where players can still bump and grind and be themselves.

New Zealand. Those folks have flattened the curve. New Zealand, where baseball can still be the perfect game and not a joke, where players could be human beings and not emotionless automations. There would be no cardboard cutouts in the stands that make you want to throw three balls at one for $10 and a chance to get a stuffed teddy bear. Baseball can be better than this.