Baseball is a game in which coaches and managers are taught that if they want to increase their team’s chance of winning, they have to “play the percentages.”
If a left-handed slugger, for example, is coming up to bat in the late innings of a tight game, and a right-handed pitcher is on the mound, the manager of the team playing defense will often yank his right-handed pitcher and put in a left-handed one. That’s because in same-handed contests, the odds increase that the pitcher will get the batter out.
Lately, though, Mississippi’s two premier college baseball programs have not been playing the percentages when it comes to balancing fan attendance at their home stadiums with lingering concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic.
On back-to-back weekends, the University of Mississippi and Mississippi State University have opened up the turnstiles and packed the people in, averaging more than 11,000 per game.
It’s not a surprise that fans of both schools would abandon caution. Mississippi’s COVID-19 numbers have dropped steeply over the past couple of months, and nearly a third of the state has received at least one vaccine shot against the virus. There’s a cautious optimism that the virus is petering out, at least in this state.
There’s also a huge pent-up demand for having fun, and sports is a great provider of that. After a year of either cancelled seasons or stadium capacity restrictions, college sports fans in this state were primed to watch firsthand some great matchups. Back-to-back weekends featuring three of the best college baseball teams in the country — Ole Miss first hosting Arkansas, followed by State hosting Ole Miss — are pretty irresistible.
Still, it’s questionable as to whether the schools, left to their own discretion after Gov. Tate Reeves dropped his order dictating capacity limits, are being reckless by providing an environment that could potentially spark a surge in infection.
Although both schools have implemented certain COVID protocols for their baseball stadiums, such as requiring masks upon entrance and exit and in the concourses, there wasn’t much mask-wearing or social distancing going on in the stands at either Swayze Field or Dudy Noble Field. And even though the risk of transmission of a virus is less at an outdoors venue than an indoors one, it’s not negligible, particularly when those in attendance are talking and cheering — and emitting lots of airborne particles — in such close proximity to lots of others traveling from all parts of the state and beyond.
It’s a little early to act as if this pandemic is over. Several nations, including Brazil and India, are as bad off as ever. Some states in this country, too, have seen another surge in recent weeks, fueled by the spread of variants from the original virus. Even with vaccinations steadily rising, it’s doubtful that Mississippi has reached herd immunity yet.
It would be a shame, given how close this state may be to escaping the throes of COVID-19, to give it new life because Mississippi’s passion for sports — and the universities’ desire to recapture some of the attendance revenue they’ve been losing — resulted in imprudent individual and collective decisions.
Ole Miss and State have gone with their gut instinct that crowded baseball stadiums, at this juncture in the pandemic, will not produce a lot of new infections. When a baseball manager does that — opting for his intuition rather than the odds — in a critical game situation, it sometimes works out just fine. Nevertheless, that manager is holding his breath the whole time, knowing that if it doesn’t, he will be second-guessed.
The administrations at Ole Miss and Mississippi State have to be holding their breaths, too.
