Blubaugh: Arrogant devotion to science lost Series; arrogant rejection of science losing fight against virus | COMMENTARY

Why even purists, lifelong fans of the national pastime, have had it with baseball was on display during Game Six of the World Series.

Why America can not and will not get COVID-19 under control was on display after it ended.

Funny how rigid adherence to some science-driven plans can get you beat while failure to follow others can get you killed.

The Los Angeles Dodgers broke a 32-year championship drought by beating the Tampa Bay Rays, four games to two, to win the World Series on Tuesday. For much of the night, though, it seemed the series was headed to a seventh game.

Blake Snell, Tampa’s ace and a former Cy Young Award winner, was dealing. He had faced 17 batters and retired 16 of them, nine by strikeout and the Rays were ahead 1-0 when Snell gave up a single up the middle. Manager Kevin Cash came to the mound, Snell uttered one of those words you can’t print in a newspaper, and a pitching change was made.

Even though the Dodgers couldn’t touch Snell. Even though the Rays had a tired bullpen. The relievers quickly turned a lead into a deficit and the Rays lost because Cash, or the Tampa Bay front office, came up with a plan to allow Snell to go just two trips through the Dodgers' lineup and, regardless of how well Snell was pitching, weren’t going to deviate from it.

For most of baseball history, the manager based decisions on actually watching the pitcher. How’s he throwing? Is he laboring? And, most important, is he still getting batters out?

This isn’t second-guessing. Snell knew it was the wrong move. The broadcasters knew it. Everyone watching on TV knew it. All Cash knew was that the metrics told him Snell is less effective the third time through the lineup. So he can ponder his analytics all offseason and fans can wonder how arrogant number-crunchers lost sight of the fact that sport is as much art as science.

Of course, in real life, arrogance has made many largely dismissive of science. Dodgers star Justin Turner became Exhibit A following Game Six.

Turner was removed from the game when a private lab made Major League Baseball aware of his testing positive for COVID-19. Yes, he had been with team all day. Still, upon confirmation that he had the virus, he was supposed to isolate for everyone else’s safety.

Yet there was Turner, on the field after the game. Ignoring security personnel. Celebrating and taking photos with teammates. Sitting next to his cancer-survivor manager. Kissing his wife. All without a mask. Potentially infecting dozens who had been living in a bubble for weeks but were about to head home to family — some of them elderly — and friends.

His defenders will say, well, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience he had worked long and hard for.

Really? How about all the people, everywhere, who’ve missed out on their own once-in-lifetime experiences. Graduations and proms. Weddings. Seeing grandchildren born. And, worst of all, not being able to spend precious final days with dying loved ones. All because of rules put in place to fight this godforsaken virus.

Should policies throughout the country have been different during the pandemic? Probably. But the biggest disservice many of our leaders have done is convincing people COVID-19 is not to be taken seriously. That it’s OK to act with reckless abandon, as Turner did.

The numbers are the numbers. More people than ever are becoming infected and we’ve passed a quarter-of-a-million dead. Yet so many foolish, arrogant, selfish people refuse to make the simplest concessions to the worst public health crisis we’ve ever seen, certain it’s a media-created hoax that will disappear after the election.

We’re trying to keep businesses open, to get kids back to school, here and nationally, but efforts to do so are hurt by those who won’t socially distance or wear masks, by those who ignore symptoms and put kids on the bus anyway, by those who go by the motto, “If you don’t get tested, you don’t have it.”

And by those who would put celebrating with teammates ahead of the health of those teammates and their families.

Cash removing Snell when he did Tuesday was stupid. But not nearly as stupid, or arrogant, nor as potentially consequential, as what Turner did.

Bob Blubaugh is the editor of the Carroll County Times. His column appears Sundays. Email him at bob.blubaugh@carrollcountytimes.com.