Pandemic, Shmandemic; This is Baseball!

By David Ogul

SAN DIEGO — My daughter tried her best to talk me out of the trip. My brother thought I was nuts. Friends were somewhere between shocked and amused. But when Major League Baseball decided to conclude an unprecedented season by allowing a limited number of fans to witness the National League Championship Series – and World Series – at the new, never-yet-opened-to-spectators home of the Texas Rangers in Arlington, Texas, I was in, pandemic be damned.

What could go wrong?

First, a little about me. I love baseball. My first job was selling programs at Dodger Stadium back when Gerald Ford was President and a child’s ticket for bleacher seats sold for 75 cents. Starting with Game 3 of the 1974 Dodgers/Pirates series, I’ve been to the playoffs or World Series in five different decades. With tickets at just $70 a pop for a comfortable, first-base view comparable to what you’d find in the Toyota Terrace level at Petco Park, with my Southwest Airlines bonus miles yielding an essentially free nonstop flight, and with nice hotels in Arlington a lot more affordable than a seedy hostel in San Diego, how could this be anything but an option worth exploring?

Of course, there was that COVID-19 thing to deal with.

So here’s what I found. Airports constantly cleaned, everyone wearing masks, social distancing protocols closely observed. Sort of like shul. We found pretty much the same thing in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Everyone wearing masks. Hand sanitizers everywhere. Social distancing protocols closely observed. Sort of like San Diego.

But I came here for baseball, and the pandemic-adjusted ballpark experience was unlike anything I had seen. And not in a bad way, either.

The new stadium sits in the Loew’s Live! entertainment complex (think L.A. Live by Staples Center) dotted with bars and restaurants suffering from a dearth of patrons during these historic times. From the outside, Globe Life Field – built just 25 years after Globe Life Park opened across the street (Petco Park is 16 years old) – looks like a giant airport hangar. Step inside, though, and beauty abounds. With rare exception, the sight lines are excellent. Concourses are roomier than the expanse of sand at a Coronado beach. Little things, such as Texas-sized rocking chairs and the added inches between rows – making getting to your seat a lot less hazardous than in a typical stadium – add to the comfort. Opening the roof of the indoor/outdoor ballpark before the game was an event in itself.

In short, it’s not the best stadium I’ve been to, but this place has more than its share of character.

Our seats were in the front row of our section. Tickets were sold in pods of four; if one seat were re-sold on the secondary market, all seats in the same pod had to be sold to the same person. Only family units or people who had quarantined together were allowed to sit in the same pod. I went with Sharon, a fellow Dodger fan for life who’s been going to baseball games with me since we first started dating more than a quarter century ago. Our kids, though, weren’t biting.

Other safety measures: No paper tickets; everything was digital, including all purchases, to reduce or eliminate touchpoints. Bags, including purses, were not allowed. There were no searches, just a stroll through a metal detector, meaning getting into the ballpark for a major league playoff game took about the same time it takes to pull a mask over your face. Attendance was limited to less than 11,000 – approximately a quarter of Globe Life Field capacity and fewer people than I’ve seen rush for the restrooms during the seventh-inning stretch at a Dodger game. The nearest fans to us were four rows behind and 10 feet to the left. I could throw a baseball to my right and not hit anyone on that side of me. To ensure no one sat where they weren’t supposed to, crews working for Major League Baseball and the Texas Rangers zip tied shut the more than 30,000 unsold seats.

The best part? An 11-run, first-inning and a 15-3 win for my Los Angeles Dodgers over the Atlanta Braves.

Would I do it again? You bet. Am I worried about contracting COVID-19?

No.

Look, there is no foolproof method, short of a vaccine, to keep any of us from contracting a disease that has killed some 220,000 or more Americans – that we know of. But if you take the proper precautions, if you wear a damn mask, if you engage in physical distancing, you know the drill, you should be fine. Perhaps not as fine as a hermit hunkered down in a cabin off the grid in some wilderness, but I refuse to stop living until we find that vaccine.

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David Ogul is a freelance writer and president of Tifereth Israel Synagogue in San Diego.