How I Helped Cancel My Baseball Season, or “A Guide to Decision Making During a Pandemic”
“The season is cancelled.”
Have you grown tired of hearing that phrase? Do you anticipate hearing it soon? Me too. Because when I’m not being an epidemiologist, I play in what we affectionately call an “Old Man” baseball league. (Though in truth it’s for anyone 35 years or older. Men and women welcome.)
This is the story of how I helped cancel our season.
I live in Minnesota. Part of the culture in Minnesota is what’s called Town Ball. Basically, it’s a bunch of guys (or gals) with day jobs who spend their time on some evenings and weekends throughout the summer playing baseball at varying skill levels on local municipal or high school baseball fields. Some of these fields are about 100 years old, steeped in local history. So common and beloved are the Town Ball teams that there’s a bar inside Target Field (home of the Minnesota Twins major league baseball club) devoted to them. It’s a quintessential Midwest summertime activity. Until this year.
Around mid-March, with COVID-19 cases on the rise in Minnesota and epidemiologists sounding the alarm, office workers were sent home, schools were closed, and professional sporting events were cancelled. I imagine similar things happened in your town.
A month later it started really sinking in that this pandemic was not going to be a short-term thing. A fellow Town Ball player and former teammate of mine emailed me to double-check how he was interpreting our Governor’s messages about COVID-19 modeling. As he suspected, Minnesota was projecting the peak of infections (and hospitalizations and deaths) to occur near the end of June or beginning of July. In short: right in the middle of our Town Ball season.
I wasn’t about to tell him what to do with his team, but it got me thinking about my own team. We’re a team of about 15 guys (no gals, yet) who range in age from 36 to 53 or so. Most of us are in pretty decent shape but a few have some underlying health conditions. The rest of our league is similar: about 200 guys (a few gals) age 35 to 60 or so with a handful of underlying, though probably not serious, health conditions.
But when I looked at the case fatality rates of people in that age group, I realized it’s possible that if all of us got infected a few of us might die. Then there’s the risk to those players’ families.
So I emailed our manager (he makes the lineups), our general manager (he handles the money), and our Director of Operations (he has keys to the field where we play), I showed them this diagram and discussed a framework for making decisions in a pandemic.
It’s a basic risk/benefit analysis, but with 4 steps to help people understand what dictates the risks and what types of benefits to keep in mind in a pandemic (or epidemic).
Step 1: Recognize that there are 2 primary layers to decision-making in the face of infectious diseases: Personal Risk and Societal Risk.
In other words, decisions you make about what to do have both personal risk and societal risk. The personal risk is based on you and your underlying health. For COVID-19 the primary considerations (as far as we know so far) are your age and your underlying health. If you’re under age 65 and don’t have obesity, heart disease, serious lung condition, or other medical condition, your risk of serious issues is fairly low.
However, you don’t live in a vacuum. Literally or figuratively. Other people depend on your ability to make good decisions. Sometimes laws dictate those good decisions. Consider bathrooms. We have laws about where you’re allowed to evacuate your bladder (pee). Those laws exist not because urinating on the sidewalk is immediately harmful to your health but because human waste spreads disease and if everyone urinated wherever they pleased, there would be problems. Likewise, decisions made during the COVID-19 pandemic need to be made with consideration for the societal effects.
Step 2: Identify the individual and societal benefit of a given activity.
This also has layers, like an Ogre, because benefits can come in many forms. Individual benefits could include your daily survival, your physical health, your mental health, and more. Societal benefits can include large-scale daily survival, economic benefits, and more. Every activity falls somewhere in the spectrum of between utterly worthless to absolutely essential. Your job is to figure out where a given activity falls.
Also, and this is very important…some people will disagree about how worthless or essential the same activity is. So, while you may think that it’s totally essential to buy a new throw pillow for your couch, someone else may disagree. And while they decide to let their kid have friends over, you may think that’s horribly irresponsible. There’s room for reasonable people to make different decisions. What’s most important is that we treat each other with respect and kindness, assuming that people are making what they believe is the best decision for them and for society.
It’s also worth noting that whatever benefits you perceive from a given activity may be gained in other, safer, ways. Physical activity and nutrition are absolutely essential but they don’t need to be done in large groups. Social interaction is very important, but there are ways to do it in smaller groups or at distances that don’t transmit viruses. Spending money to keep the economy moving is also very important, but again, there can be non-contagious alternatives to how we typically do this.
Step 3: Identify the individual and societal safety of a given activity.
Guess what? More layers! Safety and risk can come in many forms. Individual safety is different for every person (see above) and societal safety depends on many factors. Generally they are People, Place, Time, and Space. Consider the following questions to get a gauge on safety:
1. Will there be a lot of people involved? Did they have to travel very far? Are these people that don’t regularly interact with one another?
2. Are you going to be indoors? Is ventilation poor?
3. Will you be gathered for longer than 15 minutes? 30 minutes? An hour?
4. Will you be within a few feet of each other? Is there going to be any sharing of eating or drinking utensils?
More “Yes” answers to the questions above means more risk, less safety.
Step 4: Combine the overall benefit to the overall risk/safety, as represented on that diagram.
Green means you should feel no concern doing this activity. Red means that the activity should be cancelled. Orange, which is where I put my baseball team, means it probably makes sense to cancel.
As an example, here was my thought process for my baseball team.
Benefits: physical activity, social interaction, small amount of economic activity in the form of renting baseball fields, paying umpires, buying equipment.
Risks: Each game involves at least 20 people, they often don’t otherwise interact with each other and players sometimes drive 20 miles to get to games, games last 2 hours or more, in the dugout players are breathing heavy (expelling germs) because we’re middle-aged men running around in the sun, sharing equipment, and in close proximity to one another (with 1–2 feet).
Conclusions: The benefit of physical activity and social interaction can be obtained in safer ways, such as small practices or scrimmage games. The small amount of economic activity is easily outweighed by the risk of a member of a team picking up the virus and being hospitalized or killed, or passing it to one of their friends or family who may be high risk.
So, if you haven’t already, it might be good to start mentally preparing for a lot more activities getting cancelled. Parades. Big gatherings to watch fireworks. Town or county fairs. All these things pose big epidemic risks and the benefits probably don’t outweigh them. But as they say in baseball: There’s always next year. Or the year after that…