MLB has ‘hopeful’ plan for 2020
No guarantees it can be pulled off, though
WASHINGTON •A critical week in baseball’s quest to launch its delayed 2020 season began with a squabble over money and ended with a dissection of safety and testing protocols. But the sport, despite its efforts, is materially no closer to getting back on the field — a reality less about any fundamental rifts between owners and players than about the unsettling truth about this global pandemic: the coronavirus is still in charge.
Major League Baseball is expected to give its union an 80-page document laying out its proposed medical and safety protocols for starting the season, which has been delayed for nearly seven weeks and counting the pandemic.
Commissioner Rob Manfred spelled out many of its details on an interview with CNN on Thursday night: Players and other personnel would be tested “multiple” times per week, supplemented by daily temperature checks and occasional antibody testing. The Utah lab that administers baseball’s drug- testing program will run its coronavirus testing. A positive test from a player would not necessitate a two- or three- week shutdown of the sport, or even the player’s team, but would require the player to be quarantined until testing negative twice within a 24-hour period.
“Our experts are advising us that we don’t need a [ leaguewide] 14- day quarantine,” Manfred said. “The positive individual will be removed from the group [ and] quarantined, then contact tracing with the individual and point- of- care testing with the individuals to minimize the chance there’s been a spread.”
But it was perhaps most telling that Manfred, when asked by CNN host Anderson Cooper how likely it is that fans will see baseball this year, spoke not in terms of confidence, but of hope.
“I think it’s hopeful that we will have some [ baseball] this summer,” Manfred said. “We are making plans for playing in empty stadiums. But as I’ve said before, all of those plans are dependent on what the public health situation is and us reaching the conclusion that it will be safe for our players and other employees to come back to work.”
There are important negotiations still to come regarding the logistics, the medical protocols and — yes — the economics of getting back on the field, all of it saddled with a rough deadline of the end of this month, with baseball targeting a mid- June opening of “spring training 2.0” and a regular season of 82 games starting on or around July 4.
In t r uth , e ven t wo months after the sport was first shut down, Manfred still can’t say definitively when, where or how baseball will return. Only the virus can do that.