MLB’S GAME OF CHICKEN
Travel far outweighs risk of contact
It’s not the high-fiving that MLB should be worried about.
It’s the much less subtle, much more obvious risk that has been looming since the early summer, when MLB decided to focus much of its coronavirus break arguing with the players rather than preparing a safe environment for the game itself.
Obviously, it’s the travel. “We’re planning to go to Tampa at this point,” Red Sox manager Ron Roenicke said Monday. “I haven’t had any conversations with (Chaim Bloom) on not doing that.”
Florida has been averaging more than 10,000 cases of COVID-19 per day. The Miami Marlins just found out they have 11 positive tests, roughly of their traveling squad, and had to cancel their trip home to face Baltimore Monday. The players will stay in their hotel until MLB figures out what to do.
Meanwhile, they’re busy sanitizing the visiting locker room where the Marlins stayed at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia. The Yankees were scheduled to replace them, but that got canceled too.
The logical move would be to postpone the games, and MLB was willing to do that immediately. The question is where the league goes from here. The Marlins will simply call up guys from their taxi squad to replace those who are sick.
Next man up, even in a pandemic.
And while the Red Sox have felt safe in their Boston “bubble,” they’re about to leave the safety of their home to head to New York for the biggest game of the season on Wednesday, a matchup between the Mets’ Jacob deGrom and the Sox’ Nathan Eovaldi. The Sox will stay in New York to play the Yankees this weekend.
After that, they’re off to Tampa, where they’ll be flying right into the lion’s den.
Traveling will be the big test. It failed for the Marlins this weekend. In Chicago, White Sox manager Rick Renteria is being quarantined with COVID symptoms and will stay away from the team until he tests negative.
It was the first weekend and already MLB is looking down the barrel of canceling its season entirely.
Watching games this weekend, some teams took the virus seriously and refrained from high fives. Some players wore masks. But most played the game like it was any other season.
There was even a mob at home plate after the A’s had the first walk-off win of the year.
But as scary as the on-field interactions might be, it’s the off-field interactions that teams are most worried about.
“I know when you’re young, it’s difficult to be locked in your hotel room and doing nothing,” said Roenicke. “But also they realize we’ve got 60 games, we’ve got to do everything we can to try to stay healthy and eventually win as many games as we can.”
Traveling presents a nightmare situation. Teams are asking their players to behave, but they know it’s almost impossible to enforce.
“We’ve told them not to go out, you do not go into nightclubs, you do not go into bars and I don’t think these things are open anyway,” Roenicke said. “That doesn’t mean 100% a guy won’t be doing something they shouldn’t be doing.”
Of course not. And the only way MLB planned to police this was by letting the teams assign one person to enforce the rules. Most teams just added the responsibilities to someone already on the staff.
It sounds like they’re not being enforced at all.
“We feel like when you’re outside you can do more things, and if you’re not around people you can do more things,” Roenicke said. “But to be a hermit and just stay in your room for the whole time and just go to the ballpark and come back is pretty hard to tell a player that’s what he has to do.”
Andrew Benintendi put it simply, “I think we’ll be fine as long as we keep following the protocols.”
Most of the players might. But as soon as one or two people don’t, they risk spreading the virus to the entire squad.
The Sox feel fine traveling to New York, where the virus is mostly under control, but will have different rules when they get to Florida next week.
“Maybe just try to stay in the hotel, which is what we’ve told them we’d like them to do,” Roenicke said. “Just stay there. We’ll have the food for them. We’ll have a big room for them to get their treatments from the medical staff. And making them more aware of the places that are more at risk than others, and we’re going to do this in every city that we go to.
“But it’s also — I don’t want to make them fearful about going on the road, or fearful about playing and continuing on with this because I think we are doing a lot of good things.”
If they aren’t fearful, will they stick to the protocols?
As teams hit the road on Sunday and Monday for their next opponents, they open their players up to enormous risks that seem impossible to contain.
It’s wishful thinking that it’ll all work out. The Marlins’ example tells us that it won’t.