owbc

After reading the responses, I would consider going to an MLB game in 2020 if they took temperatures at the gate, denied entry to the stadium to anyone with a fever, and designed the seating with alternating rows being empty and no more than 2 parties per occupied row (so I would not have to step over anyone to get out of my seat).

We're already accepting inherent risk all over the place. That's why the virus didn't disappear after 3 weeks. Why would you accept unnecessary risk?

So when is it ok for fans to be back in the stands, in your opinion? I'm not saying today is the right answer or never is the right answer, I'm just curious what current opinions are. Keep in mind stating opening day 2021 has zero evidence it would be any lower or higher risk than letting people back in the stands right now, and continuing to try and play games without gameday ticket and gate revenues in the midterm would lead to professional sports leagues ceasing to exist? Professional sports REALLY IS all about money...playing without fans destroys their revenue model and makes professional sports immensely less lucrative for all parties - owners and players. Nothing on the time horizon matters except from the start to the end of the 2020 season. We all know the virus is still going to be around in 2020. They will deal with 2021 in 2021. 1) Players/coaches/staff in a stadium with fans would have to get on a plane and go to another city without fans. 2) How is it fair competition for one team to have fans and another to not have fans? 3) What kind of an organization would even think about having such an inconsistent policy? What motivation is there to do this other than to try and make money at the expense of safety? As for the revenue model, I'll believe there is a problem when I see evidence that an MLB owner is missing debt or salary payments or close to defaulting on their debt obligations. Or when they open their books. Until then...$1.7 billion/year in TV revenue is still coming in.

What did you two do before you were partners? Ever ask your partner out to dinner when you first started dating? I'll bet it wasn't for takeout at your place. I can tell you this - nobody is going over to anybody's house for dinner on the first couple of dates (unless you have known each other for a while through some other venue). And if you have roommates, you aren't bringing a date over for dinner. This isn't about whether sit-in dining is going away or not. It's about what % of it will return. I'm arguing less than 100%. As for air travel, everybody knows the correlation between traveling and getting sick afterwards. If it isn't the recycled air it's the close quarters, mixing of people at airports, etc. etc. All easy to mitigate when travel is 50% of normal, but when they start selling the middle seats again?

Now I'm hearing that MLB is thinking about letting local municipalities decide whether to allow fans in the stands or not. Meaning Texas could have fans while other teams do not. What a joke. It really is all about money, isn't it? If that goes through I promise to not consume a single second of MLB this year.

Travel is going to be really slow to come back. On one hand everyone I know is practically begging to travel at the first possible opportunity. But the thought of getting on an airplane with that recycled air is enough to quash any excitement I have about traveling. There are two big conferences in my field in December and January that draw 20,000+ attendees. While both are supposedly 'on' right now, all indications are that they will be virtual. These conferences are already well-known for causing everyone who attends to get sick because they happen in the middle of winter. I wouldn't be surprised if they 1) are moved to the summer; 2) never return to their previous in-person attendance levels.

Also, don't forget that Uber started as a premium "black car" service before it spread to the masses. Not that much different than the premium takeout experience that I have now experienced and don't want to give up.

It is extremely popular to get delivery to hotels. Very, very popular. Think about where most hotels are located--not downtown but the ones along highways and strip malls. People who are trying to feed their kids and get them to bed without dragging everyone into the car to drive to a restaurant. When my partner business traveled she used to do it all the time. Long 10+ hour workday, back to the hotel room, the last thing she wanted to do was go back out to get dinner. I'm on your side, my partner and I love the sit-down dining experience and are not afraid of a couple hundred dollar tab for a good night. But one of the first things we did during COVID was to order some takeout dinners from our favorite nice restaurants. And it turned out to be a really good experience. We ordered a new outdoor dining table and have a pretty good setup now for a fancy-ish meal at home and we have gotten pretty good at making our own cocktails. I can think of many nights in the 'old times' where we got home late from work and needed to eat fast. Usually that meant a call for cheap, unhealthy delivery. But now that nice restaurants are providing a premium takeout experience we are big converts.

Consumers like takeout. Venture capital has provided app-based delivery at a loss for long enough that people are used to it. Same thing happened with ride hailing apps. The taxi industry had to adapt. Restaurants are going to have to adapt. It sucks but this was already happening prior to COVID. Ghost kitchens are already a thing and will only become more prevalent.

I don't own a restaurant so I'm not sure how it balances out, but there is going to be some balance between the loss of beverage sales and the reduced labor force needed to keep a takeout operation afloat. I imagine you are right that many are running in the red. But again, my main point is that it's not government regulation that is causing this, it's the aversion of the general public to being in enclosed spaces. Even if a full return to sit-down was allowed only the 20% of people not concerned about COVID would show up. And there's no way to know when people will want to return to full-service restaurants again. Maybe there will simply be less of them in the future and more places that are optimized for takeout.

As I noted in the other thread, many businesses have used this as an opportunity to slash labor costs and trim unnecessary costs. Many were also sitting on a ton of cash which combined with the government loans has allowed them to move along. The question I have is--when will the high unemployment start to take its toll on the economy? Seems like the answer depends on how long unemployment benefits are allowed to continue. And a number of industries are counting on additional government support to make it through the rest of the year. My bet is that nothing is allowed to fall apart until after the November election.

This simulated team is starting to remind me of 2019...right when it looked like they were heading for a slide to sub-.500 they start to pull out some impressive victories. The amount of offensive firepower is also impressive. Lorenzo Cain's resurgence is a real bright spot, plus Sogard playing at an all-star level. And having Hader performing as well as recent years doesn't hurt.

Pretty much all of the non-essential businesses in Chicago. Restaurants got the go-ahead for limited outdoor seating today but... I got takeout at a Thai place on Monday and Chipotle on Tuesday. Both were jam packed. Some of my favorite upscale restaurants are booked days in advance for to-go orders. Virtually every small business has transitioned to online sales. Obviously servers and bartenders are hurting bad and not every business can transition to online. But it's not really about the regulations at this point. Nobody wants to go to a sit-down restaurant. Nobody wants to get on an airplane. Nobody wants to go sit in an office. And since we've gotten used to the new normal we may as well keep doing it until there is a vaccine. I do think mistakes were made--the farmers market near me should have never shut down when grocery stores were allowed to stay open. But they corrected themselves in mid-May and that is back to normal now.

I think the 4th of July fireworks cancellations are as much about local governments being broke as they are about crowd prevention. How many businesses are actually being held back by COVID regulations at this point? It seems like the main holdup is voluntary. Restaurants, shops, etc. are all open. Even where I am in relatively cautious Washington State the stay-at-home order is over. Everything is voluntary now. The university I work for is practically begging students to come back in the fall--but they are voluntarily choosing to not register/book leases for dorm rooms. Airfare is cheap right now but people are voluntarily choosing not to fly. I think people need to get used to the idea that many of the lost jobs are not coming back and that doesn't have anything to do with government. It is just an acceleration of trends that were already happening. I have a number of friends in management who are thankful that COVID finally gave them an opportunity to trim redundant/unnecessary parts of their businesses. Companies were just waiting for an opportunity to trim their workforces.

They don't really need to. The prorated pay per game agreement has already been rectified, so it's a matter of finding that happy medium for total number of games. I'm guessing they end up with an 80-90 game season at roughly 80-85% the agreed upon prorated pay. The owners take a hit financially but end up looking like they saved the season. The players take a hit, but end up looking like they took one for the team to bring baseball back to the masses. I think the owners have basically decided they are allocating X dollars to salary and if the players want prorated then it's going to be a 50-game season. The players will probably propose an 80-90 game season now with prorated salaries, but it seems like the owners' strategy would be to reject that one as well.

I think the Bucks are at a bit of a disadvantage having to play the winner of the play-in tournament. I would rather be in a 2 vs. 7 matchup instead of getting the hottest bubble team that will have already played in elimination games. Given that situation I think they need to play the starters as much as possible.

Sounds like MLB has no plans to make a counteroffer to the players' later proposal. What an embarrassment.

I didn't touch any of my investments in March which seems to have been the right call since they have mostly recovered. If the economy is left alone there will definitely be a second crash later this year but I expect government to step in and prevent that from happening, especially in an election year.

This is progress. I can see a compromise where they settle on 80-90 games with players receiving some additional revenue but not the full prorated amounts.

https://www.businessinsider.com/plastic-bubble-shield-design-to-stop-coronavirus-spread-2020-4

So true. It's one of the biggest downsides to our current era of social media replacing actual reporting and media sources trying to report up-to-the-second breaking news. I do think that now is a time where one can learn a lot by just stepping back, observing, and listening. Even though our society wants to move at warp speed, it is going to take time for "truth" to emerge from this, and the best one can do is to listen to as many different viewpoints of the situation as possible and to try and emphasize with where that particular observer is coming from. Especially for people like myself who are experiencing these events from a position of privilege.

Going into an "unprecedented time" and treating models as absolute predictors of what will happen. If it's unprecedented, how can we expect to get reliable data out of the model? Somewhere along the line, an individual or group of individuals, will have to plug in some numbers as a baseline to begin the projection, but how do they come up with those numbers if it is all unprecedented? Personally, I wouldn't call this science or junk science because it actually is neither. At best it's an initial hypothesis that hasn't undergone any scientific testing or scrutiny. Unfortunately, the media and politicians seem to decide what is science and, as a whole, those are probably the two least qualified groups on the planet to do that. Unfortunately there was a chance by the government to actually do some science by performing some actual contact tracing early on and proceed with policy based on some actual hard data. But Wisconsin fell flat here, and that's not to rip specifically on Wisconsin, because it seems that nationwide the government fell completely flat in what was likely the most opportune time to get some real reliable data on transmission rates. https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/health/2020/04/23/coronavirus-patients-not-contacted-covid-19-victims-wait-interviewed-milwaukee-health-department/5150125002/ So we never got "guy A" has the virus. Who does "guy A" live with? How many of the people also living with "guy A" got sick? Where did "guy A" go the last two weeks? 8 places that he can remember....how many other positive cases can we trace back to those 8 places? Apparently that's too much work for the government. They like computer models because it's easy, cheaper, techie...and they think they can easily talk their way out of ridiculous "60% infected" projections because it is SCIENCE. Complete failure. As someone who works in the modeling business, we have a saying: "All models are wrong, but some are useful." Most of what you are saying sounds like Monday morning quarterbacking. Nobody had the job of doing the above because government wasn't paying anyone to do it. That was the failure point of government--not being prepared for a disaster that everyone knew would happen eventually. So putting that aside (which is a political topic that is beyond the scope of this discussion), they really had no choice but to go to whatever experts they could find and scramble to organize. Most of the models initially came from university research groups who were applying their RESEARCH models to coronavirus. This is like if a hurricane was approaching the United States and we didn't have the National Weather Service or National Hurricane Center so we used whatever models some university scientists happened to be working at the time. That's a guaranteed recipe for delivering inconsistent messages and having to amend recommendations on the fly. If they change their policy on masks and have good reasoning for it, then it's completely logical to go with it. I certainly changed my personal opinion on masks as this whole thing evolved.

huh? No where in Boras' rant did he make that point. For the relevant question yes some teams can cover the pro-rated salaries + baseball operations namely the large market teams could. The Brewers specifically would not be able to cover the pro-rated salaries + baseball operations with their TV revenue and I believe the majority of the teams in MLB would be just barely in the black with a very small margin for error. Secondly franchise value has no bearing on player salaries and if you are comparing the two you are a fool. The Brewers are a great example of a team that tried to get public funding for their spring training facility, failed to do so, and then ate the entire $60 million cost themselves while running a record high payroll at the same time. Followed by signing their star player to a huge extension. Doesn’t sound like a team that is hurting for money to me. If fans return in 2021 then this year is little more than a bump in the road.

I’ll never understand why so many of you will bend over backwards to defend billionaires. They signed guaranteed contracts to pay players X amount for X number of games played. Every single team in MLB could easily eat a $100 million loss without any long-term consequences. All that’s going on here is straight up capitalism, they are trying to not spend a penny more than they have to. I’m not even necessarily on the players’ side, I’m just calling out the BS of the owners’ arguments. And Boras is pointing out the important fact that the players have ALL of the leverage in these negotiations, so he’s telling them not to budge.