You start with concern for the six Yankees players — for the human beings — who manager Aaron Boone confirmed as having tested positive for COVID-19, a disease that through Thursday was responsible for the death of 606,190 people in the United States, according to the CDC.
Then you think about whether a baseball game should be played when one of the teams is in the midst of a COVID-19 outbreak.
Then you mull what it means to the roster and the Yankees’ chances of winning against the first-place Red Sox, a team they hadn’t beaten in six tries this season.
Then you worry about what it means for the Yankees as they approach the July 30 trade deadline in a season that hasn’t gone at all as they had hoped.
“Business as usual,” Gerrit Cole said on Friday afternoon about the Yankees’ mindset going into their game against Boston at Yankee Stadium.
Sad but true.
The phrase “the new normal” has been thrown around so much over the past year and a half that it — like the annoying phrase “abundance of caution” — has lost any meaning.
What was wrong with the regular amount of caution? And what’s normal about six members of a 26-man roster ending up on the COVID-19 injured list before the Yankees played their first game back from the All-Star break?
None of this is normal. None of this is OK. Still, we have to deal with it as best we can. That’s what the stiff-upper-lip Yankees were trying to do without Aaron Judge, Gio Urshela and four other players because of COVID-19, and without Luke Voit because of an old-fashioned knee injury.
“That’s our reality right now,” Boone said. “We’ve got to go make the best of it. Those are two obviously great players, really important players to what we do, but we’ve got to make do with what we have . . . I’m not going to sit and stew on it. We’ve got to go out and play. Play the ballgame and try and go beat a good team.”
It was suggested to Cole that the Yankees’ roster had been hit by a truck.
Yeah, he said, “An invisible, microscopic truck that has a lot of horsepower.”
Cole, who will start on Saturday, said the players aren’t focused on the bigger picture of COVID-19 being in their midst.
“I think we just try to control what we can control,” he said. “We’re here right now. We’re getting after our preparation, getting ready for the game, shaking hands with the newcomers, getting them indoctrinated into the clubhouse and situated as best they can so they can perform tonight.”
(They probably didn’t actually shake hands with call-ups Trey Amburgey, Rob Brantly, Chris Gittens, Hoy Park and Greg Allen. Fist bumps, maybe. A wave from across the room is still safest.)
This is not the Yankees’ first COVID-19 outbreak of 2021. The first one, in May, involved mostly coaches, plus shortstop Gleyber Torres. Boone revealed on Thursday that Torres most likely was the victim of false positives back then. But the coaches definitely had it; third base coach Phil Nevin got really sick.
Boone said none of the six Yankees players who went on the COVID-19 IL are seriously ill at this point.
“We’ve had a couple of them that one feels like they have a cold,” he said, walking the line between privacy and information. “One didn’t feel good. One day, one was a little ill. Another day, some are totally asymptomatic. A little bit of everything, I would say. No one’s gotten really ill.”
Let’s hope it stays that way. Let’s hope there are no more positive tests among the Yankees, that the season continues without any further disruption, that the Yankees can declare themselves as buyers or sellers before the deadline and we can get back to thinking about stuff like that.
When you root for a team, it often can feel as if every game is life and death.
Spoiler alert: It’s not.
