1. Baseball in Limbo

The MLB season — like just about everything else in 2020 — is teetering on the brink. After a coronavirus outbreak on the Miami Marlins, the league postponed the team’s games through Sunday, while rejiggering the schedules of four other teams to accommodate. Such a scenario was to be expected, though maybe not so soon, and every other sport is watching to see how baseball handles it and what additional dominoes may fall.

2. Hoops Ahead

Look, sometimes you just have a craving for chicken wings. And sometimes, there are excellent wings to be had at a strip club. Who are we to judge Lou Williams for snagging crispy deliciousness while away from the bubble? Minor drama aside — the Clippers’ Williams will miss two games as he quarantines for 10 days, following his return from a funeral and, um, extracurriculars in Atlanta — the NBA is on track to resume Thursday night. Daily testing, mandatory social distancing rules and strict bubble enforcement have the hoopsters feeling confident, cocky even, when compared to their baseball brethren.

3. Hard Knocks

At least 25 NFL players — including Patriots' linebacker and team captain Dont’a Hightower — have said they are opting out of the coming season, for fear of the virus, as training camp gets underway. Most will get a $150,000 stipend (those deemed high-risk will get $350,000 to sit out). A sport with 53-man rosters traveling the country, rather than playing in a bubble, and featuring players crashing into one another on every play, could bring a whole new definition to the NFL RedZone channel this fall.

Many of the issues American society grapples with today stem from decisions made almost 250 years ago. OZY readers now have the chance to join Allen C. Guelzo for a deep dive into how America's Founding Fathers played their own unique roles in shaping the grand story of the U.S. Constitution. Sign up for The Great Courses Plus today for a free month of exclusive access.

1. Outfield

• Barry Bonds. Did he take steroids? Is he just a mean person? Yes and duh. He still belongs on this list. Forget for a moment the 762* home runs, and look at the best evidence of just how fearsome a hitter Bonds was: His 688 career intentional walks are more than those of the next two players combined.  
• Mike Trout. At 10 years in, he’s already amassed a Hall of Fame résumé, with a career on-base-plus-slugging (OPS) around 1.000 and three MVP Awards (plus four second-place finishes). The most complete player in the modern game.
• Willie Mays. There’s “The Catch,” but the bat was equally vicious. His 660 career homers could have been even higher had he not spent nearly two years in the Army during the Korean War.

2. Infield

• 1B: Babe Ruth. The Sultan of Swat, the Colossus of Clout, the man who cursed a franchise for 86 years: The Babe created modern sports celebrity (he was one of the first to be an advertising pitchman), but he actually lived up to the hype by launching the era of the home run.
• 2B: Jackie Robinson. You could make a statistical argument for others (Rogers Hornsby hit better than .400 three times), but there's a reason No. 42 is retired for every team in the game: Robinson is one of the most important athletes ever.
• SS: Alex Rodriguez. J-Lo’s beau put together some astounding numbers, even if you leave out his mega-contracts: three-time MVP, 696 homers, .930 career OPS. (Full disclosure: He was a host of OZY Fest.)
• 3B: George Brett. Every team needs a guy who will mix it up. And that’s this uber-competitor — just watch this video — who is also a career .305 hitter, and the first to win batting titles in three different decades.
• C: Johnny Bench. The beating heart of the Big Red Machine, Bench was one of the few ace defensive catchers — he led the league in caught stealing percentage three times — who also had pop. Serious pop. He finished with 389 career homers (second most all-time for a catcher) and led the league in RBI three times.
• DH: Sorry, no. You have to wear a glove to make this list.

3. Pitchers

• SP: Pedro Martinez. His impossibly long fingers made the ball dance, even as it zoomed into the zone at 95 mph. Peak Pedro was a force of nature, magnificent to watch, twice posting seasons under 2.00 earned run average at the height of the steroid era. Oh, and he was willing to throw down with aging bench coaches.
• SP: Bob Gibson. The greatest ones force their sport to change the rules. After Gibson posted an ungodly 1.12 ERA in 1968, MLB lowered the pitchers’ mound to give hitters more of a chance. He still held hitters under three runs per nine innings for his career.
• SP: Roger Clemens. Cooperstown won’t come calling because of the ’roids, but we will give the Rocket his due: a record seven Cy Young Awards, 4,672 strikeouts and the look of a dude you never wanted to mess with.
• SP: Sandy Koufax. His career numbers don’t stack up because he had to retire at age 30 due to arthritis in his elbow, but consider his peak dominance: Koufax led the league in ERA each of his final five seasons, and he surrendered just a 0.95 ERA in eight World Series appearances. But Koufax is perhaps best remembered for the game he didn’t play, when he sat out Game 1 in 1965 in observance of Yom Kippur.
• SP: Walter Johnson: The “Big Train” remains the No. 2 all-time in WAR, behind Babe Ruth. In an age of rubber arms in the early 20th century, he threw 110 complete game shutouts, far and away the best ever. 
• RP: Mariano Rivera. When the opening drumbeats of “Enter Sandman” started playing, announcing the arrival of Rivera from the Yankees bullpen, the game was pretty much over. His 652 saves and 205 ballpark-adjusted ERA are all-time records, and his cutter was the stuff of nightmares.

4. You Tell Us

What did we get wrong? Reply to this email or tag us on Instagram or Twitter @ozy to give us the old Earl Weaver and tell us the real greatest squad. We also need your help as we continue compiling OZY Greats lists in the coming weeks: Who’s the best in football, basketball, soccer, the Olympics and more? Send us your picks and justifications, and you might be featured in a future Daily Dose email.

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1. The Latest

The NCAA has allowed all college football teams to kick off as early as Aug. 29, to give them more schedule flexibility. Ohio State announced it’ll cap attendance and — perish the thought — ban tailgating to enforce social distancing, though the notion of any fans at all sounds aspirational. The Big Ten and Pac-12 have announced conference-only schedules, while the ACC, SEC and Big 12 are still weighing their options. The president of the NCAA said Tuesday that the virus trends need to change course in order for fall sports to proceed.

2. Money Matters

With all due respect to the volleyball and field hockey squads, the debate here is focused on football because it’s the economic engine for most athletic departments. At least 19 Division I schools have already cut some of their sports programs, including Stanford — which slashed 11 sports, the first school in the so-called Power Five conferences to bring out the ax. More will come if the football season is lost or severely diminished.

3. Settle for Bronze?

The loss of these nonrevenue teams could upend how America develops its Olympic athletes, the Washington Post reports. Nearly 80 percent of the 2016 U.S. Olympic team played in college, a development model that’s far different from other countries’ — and one that’s been astoundingly successful over the decades.

College sports were already in questionable financial shape pre-pandemic. The crisis has raised discussions about new ways of approaching the enterprise, from a European-style model of athlete development decoupled from education to splitting college sports into “spectator” and “non-spectator” sports — with only the former getting scholarships and being governed by the NCAA. Perhaps, as we suggested last year, they should start classifying players as employees.

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1. Shake Milton

The tantalizingly talented Philadelphia 76ers are making waves in the Orlando bubble by moving star Ben Simmons to power forward. That opens up the starting point guard slot to Milton, 23, a largely unheralded second-round draft pick who has done his time in the G League. Milton, who lost his father suddenly when he was in high school in Oklahoma, has battled injuries for years. But he's shown flashes of a sweet 3-point shooting stroke (above 40 percent in college and the pros) and poise in his newfound role as the engine for Philly's playoff run.

2. Brigid Kosgei

She just wants to run. The 26-year-old Kenyan — a school dropout and the mother of two — broke the women's marathon world record last year in the U.S. Now, she's waiting for races to restart after the pandemic. The London Marathon later this year could be her final chance to leave her mark on 2020, with Boston, Chicago, New York and other major marathon-hosting cities canceling their events because of the pandemic.

3. Cai Xuetong

She's leading China's snowboarding hopes as the country prepares to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. The 26-year-old won the halfpipe at the Burton U.S. Open last year, and is poised for more success in the coming years.

In the mid-2000s, the only unifying force for the Ivory Coast amid a disastrous civil war was the Elephants, the national soccer team. Its shining star was Didier Drogba, a bully of a striker and a magnetic personality. In 2006 he declared that an important qualifier against Madagascar would be held in the rebel capital of Bouaké to foster national reconciliation. And a country, at least for a moment, laid down its arms.