COVID Curveball: An Inside View of the 2020 Los Angeles Dodgers World Championship Season by Tim Neverett (review)

There is a scene in the Steven Spielberg biopic Lincoln that comes to mind whenever I think of how we have had to come to terms with what the COVID-19 pandemic wrought. The president talks about the urgency to pass the Emancipation Proclamation with an eye toward ending the Civil War. He is trying to win over an influential congressman who worries that the country isn’t prepared for what the Thirteenth Amendment would bring: the freedom of millions of slaves. “We’re unready for peace too, ain’t we?” Lincoln responds. “When it comes, it’ll present us with conundrums and dangers greater than any we’ve faced during the war, bloody as it’s been. We’ll have to extemporize and experiment with what it is when it is.”

Sports—as well as every other aspect of life—had to “extemporize and experiment” in the face of the greatest existential threat in generations. Tim Neverett, a play-by-play announcer for the Los Angeles Dodgers radio and TV broadcasts, thought to chronicle the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. In his book, COVID Curveball: An Inside View of the 2020 Los Angeles Dodgers World Championship Season, he recalls when the sporting world first fell prey to the insidious disease.

Baseball was already in the beginning stages of spring training with players; all the workers behind the scenes such as ushers, concessionaires, and office staff; and fans looking forward to another season in the sun. But like death by a thousand cuts, the wounds began to bleed bit by bit across baseball, basketball, hockey, and amateur organizations with games canceled and entire leagues shutting down as the world turned dark. Isolation was one of the major factors in an attempt to mitigate the dire threat.

On March 12, Major League Baseball (MLB) made the call to end spring training games and pushed opening day back by at least two weeks. The decision was optimistic, to say the least. MLB initiated a few rule changes in an effort to reduce game time (and thereby player contact), and the position of designated hitter was adopted by the National League. Doubleheaders were played as seven-inning contests, and extra-inning affairs began with a runner on second base. These rules remained in place in 2021, but whether some or all will stay remains to be seen.

In fact the 2020 season did not begin until July 23, when the Dodgers took their first steps toward the championship with an 8–1 win over the San Francisco Giants. Led by the diminutive, dynamic, newly acquired Mookie Betts and a brilliant performance by the pitching staff, the team waltzed to a 43-17 record, swept the wild card and divisional series rounds, and beat the Atlanta Braves in a tense LCS before claiming the World Series over the Tampa Bay Rays.

Neverett, who had just joined the team in 2019 after several seasons calling games for the Colorado Rockies, Boston Red Sox, and Pittsburgh Pirates, brings the surreality of the situation to life, with the travel restrictions, constant testing, and house arrest–like lifestyles everyone had to endure, not just the players. Thousands of stadium workers around the majors lost their jobs, since there were no fans in the stands, save some occasional creative cardboard cutouts. The minor leagues shut down altogether.

Things changed at a moment’s notice. Travel and housing arrangements had to be made. Bustling cities turned into science-fictional ghost towns as people locked themselves indoors. Neverett writes of the toll isolation and loneliness took not only on him but also on the hundreds of young athletes who handled their situation with varying degrees of maturity and integrity.

However, what begins as a very personal examination of this bizarre situation gradually turns into a fairly pedestrian day-by-day account of the season. One has...