The Daily: Life Without Sports?

July 31, 2020

By Daniel Guillemette

Baseball kicked off its long-delayed season last week.Davide Barco

Our producer and sports enthusiast Daniel Guillemette on last Friday’s episode:

When the world moved into quarantine in March, I began to wonder: What would I do with all the time I normally spent watching, reading, talking and thinking about my favorite sports? It’s been an interesting experiment to go without them — and by “interesting” I mean deeply boring.

So it was only natural I’d want to fill the void by telling a sports story on The Daily. Thankfully, Mike Schmidt, a Washington correspondent, was thinking the same thing.

Mike’s a regular on The Daily; he has been our guide through all things politics, including the special counsel investigation and the impeachment hearings. But Mike’s first beat at The Times was baseball. He has a long history with Rob Manfred, Major League Baseball’s commissioner — a relationship that began back when Mike was, in his words, an “overaggressive young reporter” and Manfred was a labor lawyer for the M.L.B. It started with them mostly yelling at each other on speaker phone, Mike said (it was the steroids era — lots to yell about), but later developed into a more civil reporter-source relationship.

In March, Mike thought it would be interesting to periodically check in with Manfred, who was home in Florida, trying to figure out how to make the baseball season happen. I got to listen in on these calls, along with a producer, Clare Toensikoetter, and two of our editors, Dave Shaw and Lisa Tobin.

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In our first conversations, Manfred was focused on the health protocols for coronavirus-era baseball (no high-fives). But as the weeks went on, Manfred became consumed by salary negotiations with the players’ union — the primary obstacle, beyond the pandemic, to restarting the season. A sign of how tense those salary negotiations got? Mike had seen Manfred in countless stressful situations over the years. But Manfred claimed this was the first time he had actually felt stress in his professional career.

To learn more about the players’ perspectives on the negotiations, we interviewed Travis Shaw of my beloved Toronto Blue Jays. He started by telling us that his life without baseball was fairly dull (that day, he was planning to make dinner at 2 p.m.). Still, he explained why he didn’t want the players’ union to back down on the salary negotiations: The average career for an M.L.B. player is a little less than 6 years, so for Shaw it was only fair that the players maximized each year they had.

After months of negotiations between Manfred and the union, the players got the salary deal they wanted, and Manfred got his season. A few hours before the first game, Mike got through to Manfred at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. In all of the calls I listened in on, I hadn’t heard Manfred in a mood like this before: The guy was downright cautiously optimistic.

I doubt that mood lasted long, though. Since our episode ran last Friday, 19 (19!) players on the Miami Marlins have tested positive for Covid-19, and the team has suspended play. All of which, understandably, has led to a lot of unease throughout the M.L.B. and has put the season in some doubt. So who knows what’ll happen with baseball this year? At least I’ve still got the N.B.A. Go Raptors!

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Introducing Nice White Parents

The New York Times

We spend most of our time covering the news on The Daily, but this week our team has some news to share: Serial Productions is now a New York Times company.

We’re excited to introduce you to our first podcast from Serial: Nice White Parents, a five-part series exploring the complicated relationship between white parents and the public education system.

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For the past five years, Chana Joffe-Walt, a reporter and producer, has been examining inequality in education. In the process, she saw that most reforms focused on who schools were failing: Black and brown kids. But what about who the schools are serving? In this show, she turns her attention to what is arguably the most powerful force in our schools: White parents.

You can listen to the first two episodes of Nice White Parents now, and if you’re interested in learning more about the history and research behind this series, here are some of the books Chana recommends.

Joan Wong

The Reading List Behind ‘Nice White Parents’

Everyone wants what’s best for their children’s education. But who gets to decide what’s best? The reporter behind our new podcast from Serial shares the books that helped her answer that question.

By Chana Joffe-Walt

On The Daily this week

Monday: Surviving the coronavirus in New York had a lot to do with which hospital a patient went to, Brian M. Rosenthal reports.

Tuesday: Nicholas Fandos takes us inside the battle over unemployment benefits in Congress — and explains the identity crisis the fight has created for Republicans.

Wednesday: China and the United States have tried to play nice for over half a century. Edward Wong examines why that status quo is changing now.

Thursday: Are tech giants too powerful? Four C.E.O.s were grilled on this question in congress this week, and Cecilia Kang was in the room.

Friday: Jennifer Steinhauer tells the story of 20-year-old Army Specialist Vanessa Guillen — and why her death has incited a #MeToo reckoning inside the military.