Nats star Ryan Zimmerman's AP diary: Baseball was unlucky

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ryan Zimmerman is a two-time All-Star infielder who has played 15 years in the majors, all with the Washington Nationals. He holds most of the team’s career hitting records, and his two homers and seven RBIs last postseason helped the Nationals win their first World Series championship. With the 2020 season on hold because of the coronavirus pandemic, Zimmerman is offering his thoughts -- as told to AP Sports Writer Howard Fendrich -- in a diary of sorts while waiting for baseball to return. In the ninth installment, Zimmerman discusses why he thinks his sport ended up in an unlucky position.

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Every week is becoming a big week to try and move forward if we’re going to have a chance to do anything this season.

In the moment, when things like this happen, there’s always sort of these two thought processes.

There’s the doomsday people that say, “It’ll never be the same if you don’t play in 2020. The fans will never come back. We’ll lose so many people. When we start up next year, nobody will watch.”

And there’s the people that say, basically, “Baseball’s been around for a long time. We’ve gone through a lot of labor things. This is an unprecedented time. We’ll survive this.”

It’s not an excuse, but when you think about it, of all the sports, we got unlucky with the timing of how this worked out -- it seems like it’s a lot more complicated for baseball.

The NBA and the NHL got pretty much three-quarters of their seasons in before the virus happened. They can set themselves up in one or two sites for their playoff scenario and control everyone’s movement.

The NFL is still 2½ months away, so if everything goes well by then, football is going to be in a way better place to play. And football plays just one game a...

source https://www.chron.com/sports/article/Nats-star-Ryan-Zimmerman-s-AP-diary-Baseball-was-15332864.php