Few things would make Pedro Urbaez happier than seeing the Mets play again.
He was born and raised in Corona, the neighborhood adjacent to the Mets’ stadium. Some of his earliest memories are of sitting in the upper deck with his father or reading baseball encyclopedias he got from his dad. Now, 38, Urbaez is a member of a popular Mets fan club and watches about 20 games in person each season, nearly all of the rest on television.
Yet with baseball and other major sports desperately seeking avenues for a return amid the coronavirus pandemic, Urbaez and other fans wonder if leagues are conflating their economic stakes with pleas full of emotion and nostalgia.
Are big-time sports actually the healing force so many public officials and sports leaders purport them to be? And do their fleeting thrills provide necessary entertainment right now, justifying the risks posed by large gatherings?
“I don’t think now is the time,” said Urbaez, who has seen firsthand the peril caused by the pandemic while working at a New York food rescue nonprofit. “We need other things to be healed, if you want to call it that, before we get to baseball.
“We need to be able to lower the number of people in hospitals and morgues. How do we get people back to work? Those things are more important in the midst of how we can heal. I can’t heal if I’m worried when I’m going to eat. I can’t heal if I’m worried that I don’t have a job or somebody is sick.”
As some states begin to loosen the reins on stay-at-home orders, professional sports leagues are also clamoring to return to work. They are multibillion-dollar enterprises, after all, with huge commitments, including television contracts and payrolls for hundreds of thousands of workers, not just millionaire players.
Americans in general have expressed mixed feelings about the prospect of sports’ returning. An ESPN survey of people who identified themselves as sports fans found that just over half missed watching live competition on TV, and many said games should come back even if — as generally proposed by leagues seeking to play again — fans are forbidden to attend. Yet in a Seton Hall poll conducted last month, 70 percent of respondents said that if social distancing continued in the fall, the N.F.L. should protect the health of its players by not starting the season.
But political leaders and sports figures, particularly in baseball, aren’t sticking to practical arguments in favor of playing. They have repeatedly turned to the nostalgia-infused rhetoric used after past tragedies — sometimes making direct connections. A sampling:
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“America needs baseball,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said he told M.L.B. Commissioner Rob Manfred recently. “It’s a sign of getting back to normal.” President Trump and Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York have expressed similar sentiments.
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“Our players will be back, and we will be part of the recovery, the healing in this country,” Manfred said in late March.
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Yankees President Randy Levine called his players “patriots” for wanting to return to help the country. He added later: “Baseball has stepped up in troubled times to be a leader. We’re used to it.”
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Scott Boras, a baseball agent, portrayed the sport as a savior in an op-ed in The New York Times last week. “Time and time again, baseball has helped our country heal,” he wrote, citing its role after the strike on Pearl Harbor, the 1989 earthquake in Northern California, the Boston Marathon bombing and the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Sports could indeed serve as a cue: In the same way that the N.B.A.’s decision on March 11 to shut down, which made it the first major American sports league to suspend operations, helped awaken the public to the severity of the coronavirus, the resumption of games could serve as a crucial sign of recovery.
But what other leisure industry is sold as a healer? When the mayor of Las Vegas argued for the reopening of casinos, she did not say it would provide a distraction or help the public heal. She wanted to restart her city’s economic engine of tourism and gambling. Could other entertainment industries, such as film and television, make similar arguments?
“Comedy is so important during these times,” said Zandy Hartig, 52, a sports fan from New York who lives in Los Angeles. Hartig, an actress whose on-screen credits include “Medical Police” and “Childrens Hospital,” has been unable to work because of the pandemic and worries about keeping her health insurance.
“It’s the same thing with a really good drama,” she said. “When it’s good, you get taken to another world, and it’s inevitably better than the world right now.”
Hartig believes sports can be similarly powerful. She remembers attending Yankees games in New York soon after 9/11 and being overwhelmed by the sense of community. She has watched grown men cry following a Knicks playoffs loss, and she said she would love to again spend time with her two sons at Los Angeles Clippers and Dodgers games.
Yet Hartig understood why the teams and her own occupation have to be reined in.
“We don’t have essential jobs, even though I kind of think sports and entertainment are on an emotional and psychological level,” she said. “It might be an addiction.”
In some ways, sports have become a “mythical creature” romanticized in popular culture, said KJ Kearney, 36, a former college football player at South Carolina State University with a background in politics, who now works at an elementary school in Charleston, S.C.
Kearney would love to be watching LeBron James in the N.B.A. playoffs for the Los Angeles Lakers right now. He understood the desire to be entertained and, for those going through hard times, to find an escape. “But there’s a difference between wanting to be entertained and claiming that that entertainment is somehow healing or closing up a fissure,” he said.
That language, he said, should be reserved for more serious matters. To Kearney, an indelible home run by the Mets’ Mike Piazza in the first professional sporting event in New York after the 9/11 attacks was no more than a distraction. Healing, he said, would have required more difficult discussions about the United States’ foreign policy, preventing future attacks and caring for emergency workers and the families of victims.
“We need to do a better job of distinguishing the obvious from the important,” Kearney said. “The obvious is we’re bored and we would like to watch sports. But that’s not the important. The important is making sure everyone is safe. Otherwise, it’s going to end up like the plague of 1918 where like 20 million people die because of our inability or unwillingness to do what is necessary to contain this virus.”
As much as Urbaez wants the Mets back, if only on TV, he said he could not support that in good conscience if it meant putting people in danger, including athletes and other team employees, or using resources needed by more essential workers.
He said it bothered him to admit that the longer he had gone without baseball in his daily life the more he could get used to it. While he missed the Mets, Urbaez’s focus remained on the return to normalcy for society as a whole.
“In the baseball and in the sports world, there’s millions and billions of dollars that could get lost, but so is everybody else?” he said, adding later: “We’re all losing. The idea that sports thinks it’ll be a good distraction, I don’t really believe it.
“If I’m watching the game with someone and I’m wearing a mask, I’m not distracted.”