Baseball’s Attempt To Play Through A Pandemic May Mirror 1918

After weeks of wrangling over various permutations mostly due to games and money, there is a plan in place for baseball to get its season underway at the end of July roughly four months after it was originally scheduled to start.

Baseball will be attempting to do this through a coronavirus pandemic that has slowed many things and halted sports.

It also will not be the first time the sports world has attempted to play through a pandemic.

The last time was 1918 when the influenza pandemic gripped the world and killed an estimated 675,000 Americans with many of similar symptoms to the current pandemic and also many of the same words – quarantine, social distancing, facemasks, and safety protocols.

Those findings were unearthed by researchers at MyHeritage.com, which normally is a subscription service for genealogy whose platform contains over 12.4 billion historical records in 14 languages.

“We’re all big sports fans so obviously we’re looking at all sports looking to return the conversations, challenges, complexities around that,” researcher Rafi Mendelsohn said via email last week. “We saw loads of similarities with the discussion taking place now and the conversations that were taking place during the time of the flu,”

Sports in 1918 was significantly different without technology, the NBA still 28 years away and the NFL still two years away from its founding in Canton, Ohio. The baseball season ended on Sept. 2 not due to the pandemic but due to the escalation of World War I which ended Nov. 11 and the Red Sox won the World Series, something they would not do until again 2004.

Babe Ruth won 11 games and hit 11 homers in 95 games two years before emerging as the game’s preeminent slugger as the most popular American sports were baseball and college football. Ruth’s emergence also occurred as World War I was in its final year and college football already had been canceled due to the war.

The Red Sox played 126 games and Ruth was amongst their players to experience sore throats and fevers, which were symptoms of the 1918 flu and are symptoms of coronavirus.  On May 19, Ruth was experiencing a terrible fever with a 104-degree temperature, aches, and chills but he was feeling better two days later even after undergoing treatment that had adverse effects and then returned to the field by May 30.

“The similarities are amazing,” Mendelsohn said. “The conversation about wanting to come back and also about health and also about distancing and touching about training. We thought it was really interesting how a hundred years later there are huge similarities between the conversations they were having then and the discussions they’re having now and the challenges they’re facing.”

The concerns are also with additional outbreaks and as of Wednesday, players from the Phillies, Blue Jays, Mariners and Rockies have tested positive for coronavirus. Then there is the concern about large gatherings such as sellout crowds at Yankee Stadium, located in one of New York’s most impacted zip codes in the Bronx.

And then there is the concern about letting fans back in too soon, which is what happened in the 1918 pandemic. In 1919, the Stanley Cup final between the Montreal Canadiens and defunct Seattle Metropolitans was impacted.

The series was tied at two games apiece and the deciding game was slated for April 1, 1919. It was then halted when players on both team became seriously afflicted with the virus and then Montreal defenseman Joe Hall died of pneumonia caused by the onset of the influenza.

That came about six months after the Red Sox beat the Cubs for the World Series with fans in attendance. Ruth batted xx and the final three games at Fenway drew more than 62,000 people with little distancing

“It’s just amazing that a hundred years later it’s the exact same situation,” Mendelsohn said. “If you changed the date and you just took the text from these articles it could be written and published today and that really is interesting.”

So far, horse racing, auto racing, golf and boxing have returned with protocols in place. Baseball was the last of the three interrupted leagues to figure out a plan and this time many will be watching to see if sports can avoid the disastrous impact of the 1918 pandemic.

If the July returns go off without a hitch, football could be next, though there have been a few outbreaks at schools like LSU (at least 30 players) and Clemson (23 players).

“During this we’ve been really interested in looking at the similarities not just in the U.S. but all around the world and a big conversation for people who follow sports is how sports will return,” Mendelsohn said. “That was interesting for us we wanted to see how that was covered.”

In the meantime, terms such as social distancing and facemasks will remain in the vocabulary for sports and beyond for the remainder of this year and possibly into next year.