1918 season was short due to WWI, 1919 was full length and I think most people know what happened in that World Series. Tweaks to the schedule don’t really get talked about. I’d be interested in learning about it if you find anything!
Google search on MLB and 1918 https://sports.yahoo.com/coronaviru...-the-1918-spanish-flu-pandemic-184042838.html https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-s...918-f498f2d4-7726-4a02-a5f5-59c63d982764.html Baseball wasn't effected too much, college football in 1918 was weird, and there was no Stanley Cup in 1919 because both teams were sick.
The Philadelphia Phillies have canceled workouts today after a coach and clubhouse attendant tested positive for coronavirus. Activities are shut down “until further notice,” according to the team.— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 30, 2020 to answer the question
Re 1918, the latest issue of Sports Illustrated has a long-form fiction piece "written by" a Boston sportswriter to us, in the form of letters, about the intersection between baseball, the war, and the Influenza Pandemic. It's an interesting piece.
In 1985, I worked at a local radio station as a high school football play by play announcer. My alma mater, never known to be a football juggernaut, qualified for the state playoffs that year following an exceptional season. The first round opponent happened to be a school that was always good at football and no stranger to post-season play. Even though the schools were not too far from each other and played common opponents, I knew they had never met each other on the gridiron while I was growing up, so...I went to the local library to research if they had ever played each other in football (they always played each other in basketball in a non-conference game). They had played each other 14 times in football, but the previous meeting was in 1943! Long story short...my research spurred me on to compiling a football and basketball history of my old high school. In 1918, the team only played one football game. In 1916, 1917, 1919, and 1920, the schedule consisted of 5 to 7 games annually. During the flu pandemic of 1918, neighboring schools had trouble fielding teams because too many kids were out sick. During the winter months, most basketball teams in the area were used to playing 15 to 20 game seasons. My high school only played 9 that year. The county where I live held a county basketball tournament from 1916-1942. 1919 was the only year the tournament was not held, as the second wave of the pandemic hit my area hard. An issue of the local newspaper in March, 1919 had a front page that consisted of nothing but obituaries of local people that had died from flu complications. The age range was infants to people in their 80's.
Well, even F1 is not absolved of failure: F1 considers season-long restrictive bubble after Pérez tests positive https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2...restrictive-bubble-after-perez-tests-positive Pérez tested positive for the virus on Thursday and it was revealed that since the last meeting in Hungary he had flown home to Mexico to visit his mother in hospital. Pérez was within the FIA’s current code of conduct as he made the trip between the last tranche of three races where the drivers remain in a defined bubble of personnel and the current three meetings. Racing Point’s team principal Otmar Szafnauer defended Pérez but acknowledged that perhaps the sport would have to impose a season-long restriction on interaction between Formula One personnel and the wider world. “Between Hungary and here we had had that weekend off, everybody went to where their families were,” he said. “The drivers went to their home countries. In hindsight perhaps we should look at that and change the code and say throughout the season you stay in your bubble. That is something for the FIA to consider. The code of conduct is a living document as we learn this process. But I don’t think Checo did anything wrong going back to his family. He took all the precautions, it is no different than Ferrari going back to Italy.” Sucks, but that is what happens when one travels outside the bubble. Just ask the NBA. I hope he is okay as Perez is currently T5 in the driver's standing and the team is 4th in constructors standings.
How many people do they need to have a race? 1 driver per car, 1 pit crew, 1 finish [or a Swede] flag guy, 1 announcer, 1 Dr to apply the balm [insert Jackie Chiles meme]! Everyone wearing a mask and not wearing deodorant! Sheesh!!
I know (and care) zero about racing, but your post reminded me of the planning to restart the Premier League. Initial count was, for each game, there needed to be about 400 people physically present when you count players, officials. coaches, medics, media. sounded nuts to me but I think the final numbers were pretty close to that.
From a couple of players on Virginia's soccer teams, they are hearing the NCAA is going to announce Tuesday that all fall championships, excepting P5 football, will be cancelled.
NHL hockey is back tonight. The bubble for the eastern conference is here, the west is in Edmonton. I’ve been doing trainspotting FaceTime calls with my niece and nephew for various modes of rail transit during the lockdown, because they love trains. So on Thursday I took the airport train to Union Station and wandered around nearby - across the street the Royal York hotel has been commandeered for their bubble - so far there are no positive tests in either group. Fingers crossed, they can pull this off.
my impression is that the success or failure of the bubble approach is highly - highly - dependent on the discipline of the players ie not to go walkabout to bars, restaurants etc. which is not at all easy to do I expect given the "same routine, staring at the same 4 walls every day" nature of the thing. I hope the NHL and NBA can pull it off.
Is there a Country/Western song for that? Of course there is!! ♫ Hello walls, (hello) (hello) How'd things go for you today? And I'll bet you dread to spend Another lonely night with me Faron Young....RIP
Let's admit Trump made a mistake, so Can we just stay home? Quarantine's never easy to take, but Can we just stay home?
Lost in the news about the virus sweeping through the Marlins was the Post's Dave Sheinin reporting that Washington Nationals overwhelmingly voted NOT to travel to Miami to play the games, citing the spiking of cases in Florida in general, and Miami in particular. On Monday, Nationals players voted overwhelming not to travel there for a series this weekend, but the series was eventually postponed because of the Marlins’ outbreak. That link leads to this article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/spor...-apparent-coronavirus-outbreak-among-players/ Now, in reading that article, I don't see any mention of the team vote, but it would seem a strange thing for a professional reporter to just make up, so I am going to presume that Sheinin is accurately reporting on the vote. On the football side of things, 8 players from the New England Patriots have decided to sit out the season. These are professional players. Power 5 college football appears to be heading full steam into playing, only their players simply do not have the agency that a professional athlete has. Certainly the pros are older and many have families to think about, and I know that 21 year-olds think that they are invincible, but I have to think that if pros are having these kinds of reservations than the "kids" will too. Yeah, these kids are adults, but if something goes wrong, someone dies, someone develops life-long debilitations, the universities are going to open themselves to a world of lawsuits. If schools feel they have to play football because they have too many bills to not to, well, then they can't afford the lawsuits that inevitably come. Some feel that if we don't play, that college sports will never be the same. I've come to the opinion that if we do play, it's going to wreck college sports.
This is another example of how you really can't successfully open things up if you never got infections down to a minimal level in the first place. The lowest we got to was ~20k new infections a day because, as a country, we were never willing to take measures consistently that would have resulted in a much lower count. The same problem will also plague any school openings that happen this fall.
ESPN reported on a Washington Post story about SEC players having concerns about playing football. I didn't read the story, but the intimation was these players were told by conference officials that teams would experience outbreaks of the virus, but there was little that could be done to prevent that. Really? Meanwhile, football players at several Pac-12 schools are threatening training boycotts unless protocols are in place to address coronavirus, but also concerns about racial inequality issues that some players feel exist on their campuses. California and Arizona have experienced significant jumps in COVID 19 cases over the past month, and half the schools in the conference are located there. USC and the public colleges in California will go with on-line classes at least for the fall semester. Stanford is apparently holding classes on campus for the first quarter, but only for about half its students.
"Yeah, some o' ya'll will catch th' vahrus, but whut else kin we dew? We done run plumb out of s'lewshuns..." Thuh S.E.C.- H'it jest means mower There are no sufficient protocols except staying the ******** home. Sooo, the non-athlete students will be at home, but the athletes are still playing ball...