The big news on everyone's mind is the announcement by the head weasel for MLB that Spring Training is officially postponed (delayed, scaled down -- choose the descriptor that best suits your blood pressure). No one can say this development was a surprise and with the COVID situation still fluid, it's not necessarily a bad thing to shorten the season until there's some uniformity about how to handle people who do or do not get their vaccinations.
One good approach to take would be to enforce a stiff penalty on whatever team is unable to play due to a COVID outbreak. The fact that they allow the disease to proliferate without either proper sanitation procedures or vaccine requirements means that the other club scheduled to appear in that came is shut out as well. Approach the head weasel and demand that any team unable to complete its scheduled games through their own fault should be charged with forfeiting the game. Miss a few days of ticket sales and a game in the standings then it shouldn't take long for the owners to get a bit more stringent in their disease prevention procedures.
Today, however, rather than continue to whine about the lack of progress on the lockdown, there's another situation that got a few small headlines but did not carry nearly as much media weight. It's not even the ludicrous decision to say Trevor Bauer is innocent of the various charges against him for inappropriate sexual activity.
Some of the team's former employees have already discussed the late player's addiction to oxycodone and his source for the drug. The former communications director Eric Kay who is facing felony charges for distribution of a controlled substance. That part of the equation was fully expected and surprised no one.
However, there was a new revelation with a Mets link that certainly should be reverberating off all the walls in Mets-land. An accusation has been made by Kay that the pink pills provided to Skaggs were Percocet which were provided to the pitcher by one Matt Harvey.
Before everyone gets on the whack Harvey on the head with a sledgehammer bandwagon, the medical examiner's office found the presence of the opiod in Skaggs' system but no acetaminophen. Percocet is a combination of the two substances. If there was no acetaminophen then it wasn't Harvey's Percocet that contributed to the pitcher's death by asphyxiation on his own vomit, not a drug overdose.
What the court will be looking to find out is if Harvey was a part of the ongoing problem with internal distribution of drugs withing the Angels infrastructure. He won't be likely charged with anything directly concerning Skagg's death, but that's a mighty big shoe that could drop if it's found out he was passing out his Percocet to someone already with substance abuse problems.
It was pretty clear from the way things ended in New York that Harvey was not always making the smartest decisions nor acting the most professional ways possible. It was a shame to see his once highly promising career derail both from injuries, illness and some questionable choices.
I sincerely hope Harvey is found innocent if he is indeed not culpable of Percocet sharing and distribution, but if he's guilty then I want to see him treated not as a celebrity but as a street-level drug pusher. That won't happen, of course, but people won't learn about consequences if they never see them enforced.
Morning Reese.
ReplyDeleteI truly believe that the owners and player reps will move to settle the lockout so they can get back on the field and take this story off page one.
Missing John,
Percocet I am not that familiar with - I am more familiar with legal drugs, like popping two Macks Mets pills every morning.
ReplyDeleteAfter I saw a video put out by an apolitical British doctor named John Campbell, in which he analyzed CDC study data, I was absolutely stunned to see two CDC graphs, one for California COVID, one for NY COVID. It had 4 lines: 1) unvaccinated folks 2) vaccinated 3) vaccinated and natural immunity acquired from having had COVID; 4) no vax, but naturally acquired immunity from having had COVID.
One would have expected VAX + acquired immunity to be the best. However, it was essentially tied, over a span of months, with those who ONLY had acquired immunity. The lines for those two were virtually on top of one another for the entire period, not diverging, both sitting way at the bottom of the graph.
Those who were vaccinated did pretty well, but significantly worse than the above two. Obviously those who were neither vaccinated nor had acquired immunity were at the highest risk.
There were actually two sets of CDC graphs, the second being hospitalizations. Identical results, essentially.
Anyone wants the link to the video to see it for themselves, I'd be happy to add it here.
Omicron will have infested a huge portion of the population by the time spring starts. People who fell into the vaxxed/natural immunity categories have had quite a few breakthrough cases, but mostly mild due to protection. My call would be to have players prove they EITHER had vaccinations that were pretty recent or natural immunity, immunize the rest (should be very few), and play ball. A Johns Hopkins study found that 99.3% of those in its large test evaluation that had natural immunity since the start of the pandemic still had evidence of antibodies - they concluded it is significantly more durable than vaccine protection.
The country of Denmark agrees with that approach. The somewhat weaker Omicron got there before it got here. A country with a far lower death rate than ours, you'd expect to stay conservative. Nope. They have removed ALL restrictions. Their thought: we can't stop it, so we won't try. I think, if it is a good enough approach for Denmark, then my suggested approach above should be the way to go.
Let's say spring training starts in a month. Omicron will be largely done. Why do I say that? In Suffolk County, just after New Years, one day there was a 29% positive test rate and 6.700 positive tests in a single day. It is plummeting and the last two days averaged 3.3%, nearly 90% lower, and less than 400 daily cases, a 95% drop. And plunging fast. Every day is lower. My guess is 80% of Suffolk has had Omicron, since that 6,700 in a day only included official tests, not at-home tests or people who didn't get tested because they didn't feel too bad or were asymptomatic. Maybe the real number that day was 30,000 or more.
So where will it be in a month? Somewhere from very low, to virtually gone. In a month, it will most likely be safe again, especially if you are vaxxed and/or have natural immunity.. As close to normal as we can get. Play ball.
Of course, if the government had seen fit to "Warp Speed" the production of Paxlovid and Molnupirovir anti-virals, there wouldn't be a shortage of those, and that would have put people at far more ease at this point.
That's my take, except to say that the recent spate of players in different sports testing positive is going to vaporize within a month. The landscape will be drastically different by mid March..
Mack, my sense of there being a real possibility of a near term settlement was why the "How I would end the lockout" article I posted yesterday was moved up by me. Originally I had it about 10 days later. That article would have been a waste of energy if a settlement was suddenly announced.
ReplyDelete