On the heels of the World Health Organization's recent advisory that travellers avoid Toronto due to the SARS virus, Major League Baseball decided to pile on with a rather public warning to its players. The warning advised visiting players to avoid hospital visits, public transportation and signing autographs.

The WHO edict has been roundly lambasted as an overreaction for a disease that's been effectively contained; an overreaction that will seriously harm Toronto's economy in the short term. That seems a reasonable conclusion since this is a virus with less than 100 active cases in a city of more than three million people, but I can forgive the WHO because, overreaction or not, their mandate is to keep people healthy. You can't contract SARS in Toronto if you're not in Toronto, sort of like the old medical standard:

Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this."
Doctor: "Then don't do that."

For Major League Baseball, a billion dollar industry with million dollar employees and heavy commitments in Toronto, travelling to the city is essential. With the number of SARS cases on the decline, and no new cases in more than a week, you’d think that a Blue Jays homestand would be treated like business as usual. Of course, this is Major League Baseball, where the sky is perpetually falling, and so, instead of a cautious, low-key approach to the SARS issue, Toronto fans were treated like plague monkeys, much to the chagrin of Blue Jays President Paul Godfrey and the rest of the organization.

Let's examine the points of the MLB warning:

Avoid hospital visits: Ok, it was easier for the US Special Forces to get into that hospital in Iraq and rescue Pvt. Jessica Lynch than it is to get into most Toronto hospitals right now. Simply put, the chances of an unsuspecting player wandering into a SARS ward are exactly nil.

Avoid autographs: Actually, the recommendation of baseball's medical advisor, Dr. Elliot Pellman, was that players use their own pens when signing autographs, and that they avoid close confines and "intimate crowds," which hardly describes the SkyDome, even when full.

Avoid public transit: Uh huh. I ran into Jason Giambi, Manny Ramirez and Torii Hunter on the subway last week, and they all seemed to think this was a sound idea…

I don't mean to downplay the seriousness of SARS, but all of this information could have been sent to opposing teams via internal memos, with discretion. Such an approach might have helped prevent the media circus around the Royals-Jays series. Certainly, after the WHO advisory, it's reasonable that Bud Selig face questions about SARS, but again, he could have diffused the situation by simply stating that visiting clubs were taking precautions, and that the risk to players is very minimal. After all, the victims of the disease have an average age north of 70, and Jesse Orosco isn't coming to town any time soon.

Then again, expressing confidence in anything has never been a strong suit of Selig's, and so the league office was "very sensitive and very concerned." This concern naturally spread to the players, and suddenly, Anaheim P Kevin Appier is asking for games to be moved out of Toronto and baseball's executive vice president Sandy Alderson is dispatched to SkyDome for some hasty damage control. All for a crisis that could have been largely avoided with the application of a little more common sense.

Hopefully, the damage control is in time. The SARS scare could hamper J.P. Ricciardi's ability to make mid-season trades, as players could simply refuse to report, citing SARS as the reason. That may sound far-fetched, but remember that Raptors centre Antonio Davis almost left the city because of the metric system. If SARS hasn't been completely eradicated, both in hospitals and the news media, six months from now, Toronto could be a very tough sell for prospective free agents.

To combat dwindling crowds, the Jays have reduced ticket prices for Tuesday's game to $1. Maybe a crowd of 50,000 will convince opposing players and Major League brass that SARS really isn’t the end of the world.