By the end of the month, Major League Baseball plans to be one of those American professional sports that will open up for business without any paying customers.
It's such an odd situation that it deserves to be unpacked a little. That includes wondering out loud if this is the year, with a global infectious disease pandemic, that sports moves closer to completing its transition from an in-person experience to a reality TV show.
And is sports played for TV still live? Of course, even "live" needs some explanation, what with the average length of ninth-inning games in Major League Baseball setting another record last year, at more than 3 hours and 5 minutes. The last decade has really become baseball's second "dead ball" era.
Baseball is not timed. Over in the National Football League where games are run off a clock, play is simply stopped when it's time to run more advertising in front of fans watching on TV.
What we're seeing this year is, of course, shaped by an effort to improvise a season that had been suspended this spring due to the COVID-19 pandemic. MLB and its teams couldn't work out an agreement with the players' union, so the league office then elected to dictate a 60-game season. The Minnesota Twins are scheduled to open play this year in Chicago on July 24.
With our country's dismal performance in restricting the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, baseball may not make it all the way through the World Series or, even worse, get going at all.
You could hear the stress and unease as Twins players and others have talked about playing this year, and several high-profile players have opted to skip the season altogether.
The teams generally decline to say anything about their finances, so it's not easy to know how a business can still be a business when it opens up without customers. The best we can do to get a sense of where the money comes from is the estimates routinely published by Forbes.