Time short to sort out some kind of season
Players beginning to question MLB’S ability to follow basic safety protocols
As Major League Baseball tries to ramp up toward a weird pseudo-season, bad news has smacked it in the face like a sharp grounder that took a funny hop.
Several teams — four, at last count — had to cancel scheduled workouts on Monday as they waited to receive COVID -19 test results from a lab in Utah that was closed on a holiday long weekend. Others reported that the tests themselves weren’t conducted on the weekend, even though the league’s safety protocols required testing to be done every other day.
There were reports of missing personal protective equipment at stadiums, and reported worries among some players that organizations weren’t following the strict health precautions with any diligence. But at least MLB managed to give the whole exercise a cute name: Summer Camp. It even has a sponsor. Branding wins again.
In a way, this is surprising. MLB knows that these reunion camps provide a short window during which it can demonstrate that its guidelines will allow baseball to be played this summer without exaggerated risks to its employees. It needs to be showing off smooth operations at this point, and that need is more urgent for baseball than in the other team sports resuming their businesses for two reasons: MLB needs buy-in from its own players, many of whom are understandably reticent to join baseball’s travelling circus for less than 40 per cent of the salary that they were expected to earn in the 2020 season.
And it also needs buy-in from its communities, because MLB eschewed the “campus bubble” route and is instead intending to play in home ballparks, moving hundreds of players and staff around the United States (and maybe even into Canada!) at a time when COVID-19 case counts are climbing in many parts of the country.
Local health authorities won’t be thrilled to learn that MLB’S strict testing regimen — which included repurposing that Utah drug lab into a dedicated clearing house for baseball’s COVID results — didn’t anticipate a holiday-weekend closure, despite the fact that the holiday’s date, the Fourth of July, is right there in the name. What does it say about MLB’S safety standards when it can’t get these basic details right?
And yet, this also isn’t surprising. Major League Baseball has displayed a unique ability to step on a rake in recent years, with a championship team marred by a cheating scandal and a sudden change in the performance of its baseballs that the league has been unable to explain. When you can’t even figure out why one of your foundational pieces of equipment isn’t working in the same manner, perhaps it should come as no shock that complicated infectious disease protocols might be beyond you.
It’s also true that baseball’s present mess is entirely fitting, given the events of the past few weeks. Major League Baseball had a chance to come back early, to fill a void in the sporting calendar and soak up mostly undivided attention. Instead it devolved into a labour dispute, because the enmity between the league and its players’ union is so strong that they were unable to set it aside for long enough to deal with the idea of baseball in a pandemic. So while other leagues at least agreed on the key points of their return to play strategies weeks ago, and have spent the intervening time getting prepared on one track while negotiations have continued on another, MLB seems to have spent the time mostly focused on trying to squeeze concessions out of the MLBPA and trying to decide if it wanted to have baseball at all this season. When it finally decided to go ahead, it was left trying to scramble everything into place at 30 ballparks — or up to 32, depending on how many of the Toronto Blue Jays’ parks you’re counting.
Washington Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle offered a wise summation of what all this meant to players, as they were thrown back into camps that are at varying levels of COVID-19 preparedness.
“It’s very, very different,” Doolittle told reporters on Sunday. “And, unfortunately, there’s not a long period of adjustments and there’s not a lot of room for error. So, I don’t know. I don’t know.”
By Monday, Atlanta’s Nick Markakis was adding himself to the list of players who are opting out of the mini-season, saying that he was shaken by the experience of his teammate Freddie Freeman, who has COVID-19 and is symptomatic. That list includes stars like David Price of the Dodgers and Ryan Zimmerman of the Nationals, and it is bound to be in double digits soon.
Sports have managed to return in Asia and Europe with, so far, few setbacks. Underpinning all the hopes that the same could happen here is the belief that, with frequent and widespread testing, a few positive results could be dealt with while avoiding wider outbreaks. But MLB didn’t make it through its first weekend without significant testing failures. And while other leagues have also had some positive tests among their player pools, they believe those cases can be eliminated once teams arrive in their controlled bubble environments.
There will be no bubble to save baseball, though, and it’s already something of a gong show.
But the news will have to get better. It can’t get worse. Can it?