Justin Turner — with COVID — joining Dodgers’ celebration a sadly fitting end to season | Opinion

Baseball’s World Series gave us an absolutely perfect ending to the 2020 season, the strangest of all time.

It was not perfect from a baseball standpoint, except of course to a Los Angeles Dodgers team winning it all for the first time in 32 years, since Orel Hershiser and Kirk Gibson.

No, it was a perfect ending as a mirror on America in this year of the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

The final images of the season reflected so damned accurately a country literally playing in a pandemic, and not taking seriously enough a plague whose American death toll on Wednesday stood around 227,000. And climbing.

We should be talking today about the Dodgers finally getting over the hump to win the franchise’s first World Series since 1988. About L.A. celebrating yet again just 17 days after the Lakers won the NBA Finals.

We should be talking baseball and second-guessing the manager! Can you believe Tampa Bay’s Kevin Cash giving the early hook to Blake Snell when Snell was dominating? Over-managing gone way wrong.

Instead, we must talk about what is more important, and what kicks dirt on the Dodgers’ triumph.

So Dodgers third baseman and team leader Justin Turner does not come out for the eighth inning. Odd. The TV announcers wonder why. A minor injury? What?

Soon it is revealed Turner has tested positive for COVID during the game. He is instructed to self-isolate.

He failed at that. Spectacularly. Miserably.

There was Turner, joining the postgame celebration, hugging teammates, posing for the team photo, his reddish beard not hiding the constant smile.

There was Turner, quite literally a grinning fool.

There was a man who had just tested positive for a deadly contagious disease, behaving like a man who didn’t believe in science or hadn’t followed current events the past eight months or so. There he was, no mask in sight, kissing his wife, potentially infecting his teammates.

It was the ultimate bookend to the delayed, shortened season, which began with a virus outbreak within the Miami Marlins causing a spate of postponed games.

Now, in one instantly iconic, notorious photo, here were Turner and Dodgers manager Dave Roberts pictured with the World Series trophy. Neither man wearing a mask. One had COVID. The other is a cancer survivor.

Astonishing, really.

But is it any more more astonishing than the president of the United States, who himself recently tested positive, speaking to packed, shoulder-to-shoulder rallies in his reelection campaign? To throngs in which protective masks are as rare as Democrats?

Is it more astonishing than Florida Gators football coach Dan Mullen saying he wanted to see a sold-out stadium? Just before a COVID outbreak within his own team caused a two-week shutdown?

It is more astonishing than any number of videos of somebody raging inside a store because he is being asked to wear a mask and takes this simple, shared civic obligation to be an affront on his freedoms?

Experts warn the spiking virus could cause the U.S. death toll to top 400,00 by year’s end. It is axiomatic: The more we do not take this threat as seriously as we should, the longer we will be dealing with it as a nation. It’s a simple fact: “Opening up the country” with the economy first in mind, as Florida’s governor is wont to do, exacts its toll in increased cases, and deaths.

Russia just imposed a national mask mandate, by the way. Russia.

The United States of America, evidently above fear, science and common sense, still has no such thing.

So congratulations, Justin Turner. Not for your World Series ring. For being the new, grinning face of oblivious, callous disregard for our most deadly health plague in a century.

God bless America, play ball and party on!

Maybe, someday, the death toll will be high enough to earn our collective attention and action. Or, maybe not, in which case our sports arenas and stadiums won’t be full again for a long, long time.

#WearAMask