Barnes tests positive for COVID
Several others in protocol as Opening Day roster takes a hit
Less than a week before the Red Sox begin their 2021 season, a COVID-19 outbreak is threatening to reshape their Opening Day roster.
Reliever Matt Barnes tested positive for the coronavirus on Thursday and the team is now scrambling to figure out if anybody else has been infected.
“It’s a fire drill now,” manager Alex Cora said.
Barnes has been ruled out for Opening Day. He had been in competition with Adam Ottavino to be the team’s closer. It’s a role Cora wanted to officially name soon, but without Barnes available Ottavino appears to be in line to get first crack at the job.
Cora said the team learned the results of Barnes’ positive test on Saturday and there are several players, including pitcher Matt Andriese, who are currently in the COVID-19 protocol while the team performs contact tracing.
Barnes is the only one who has tested positive so far. Andriese was scratched from his scheduled start on Saturday afternoon.
“It’s unfortunate, but this is the world we’re living in and we have to make adjustments,” Cora said.
Major League Baseball has thus far had great success avoiding outbreaks thanks to strict practices this spring. As of Friday, MLB had performed 72,751 tests with only 17 positives (12 players, five staff members).
Cora was quick to ensure there was no blame placed on Barnes, who will be quarantined for at least 10 days per MLB’s guidelines. Barnes will need to be cleared by team doctors as well as someone from the joint committee, undergo a mandatory cardiac evaluation and be determined that he’s no longer a risk to others before he can return.
Eduardo Rodriguez, who had COVID-19 last summer and developed myocarditis, which cost him the whole season, said he was nervous about the outbreak.
“I dont want to have that again, so that’s my concern,” Rodriguez said. “I want to keep following the rules, keep to myself and protecting my teammates as most as I can because that’s something I don’t like to play around with, not after what happened to me last year. I just talked to most of the guys and said, ‘bro, stay 6 feet apart, wear your mask as often as you can and follow the rules.'”
The tricky part now is figuring out who Barnes has been in close contact with. Because of MLB’s use of contact tracing devices that must be worn by every player and staff member while at team facilities this spring, the Red Sox should quickly have a clear understanding of who else needs to quarantine.
MLB guidelines state that anyone ruled to have been in close contact with Barnes will have to quarantine for at least seven days, and must test negative on Day 5 or later before returning to the club.
Cora said he expected to find out more later on Saturday about which Red Sox players were in close contact and how that would affect the club’s Opening Day roster.
“There’s a chance that some of the guys that are in contact tracing might be able to be in the Opening Day roster; some of them won’t,” Cora said.
He declined to say which players were in question.
“It’s nobody’s fault,” Cora said. “That’s the first thing. They’ve been very responsible. We’ve been praising them throughout camp. It just happened. But today, you can feel it, you don’t want to hear this. You start thinking about, what if something else happens? Where are we going to be in a few days? It’s not comfortable…
“It’s a different mood, to be honest with you. It’s not a good feeling. But trusting the process, trusting our medical staff, trusting the testing system, we should be OK.”
Because of the shortened depth, the Red Sox played only seven innings on Saturday and will play just seven innings again on Tuesday in their final spring training game. They’ll play nine innings on Sunday and Monday.
“We got a lot of bodies around, we just have to sit down, slow this thing down, map it out and be ready for April 1,” Cora said.
There was talk before spring training about MLB wanting to delay the start of the season one month, allowing time for more people to become vaccinated, but the players ultimately rejected that proposal.
“We sign up for this,” Cora said. “This is the world we live in. This is not only the Boston Red Sox, it’s happening everywhere. It’s a bad moment, but we cannot blame Matt. The chances were high that something like this was going to happen.
“It’s a lot different than last year. That’s something I said early in camp, the fact that you’re playing games in Florida, you’re moving around, traveling, going all over the nation. It’s a lot different than just what happened last year, so we just got to stay the course, we still have to stay disciplined.”