The good and the bad

Let’s start with the good news. My brother-in-law's favorite soccer team, Liverpool Football Club, officially won the English Premier League Championship with seven games left to play. This is their first championship in 30 years. In 2019, they also won the European Championship. They blew away the all the competition in the Premier League this year.

In addition, baseball is finally scheduled to start a 60-game season July 24 with a second “spring” training starting July 1. It took an awfully long time to come up with this plan, and I just hope they will be able to see it through.

For the Phillies, if the season starts as planned, they will be playing 10 games against each of their division teams – Atlanta Braves, New York Mets, Washington Nationals and Florida Marlins. Then they would play against the American League East teams for the last 20 games in the reformatted regular season. This is all being done to help limit the amount of team travel and reduce the chances of exposure to this virus.

Now for the bad news. 

I would not want to be in the position of a major sports commissioner at this time. There have been positive COVID-19 test results in almost every sport that is or has attempted to come back so far. This includes golf and tennis which have already started, and baseball and basketball that haven't even started yet. I wonder what the number of positive tests will have to be before the various commissioners would feel compelled to pull the plug on coming back or continuing. I hope this doesn’t happen, but it is quite possible. I am very worried about basketball because it is supposed to be based in Orlando, Fla., which is struggling with very high numbers of new cases. We will see what happens.

The NFL has canceled the Hall of Fame preseason game between the Cowboys and the Steelers. This was supposed to happen Aug. 6. Don’t be surprised if many more preseason games are canceled.

I'm hoping there's more positive sports news to report next week. Stay well everyone.