Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Pause ’n’ effect: Next call is crucial
It’s the right decision, the easy decision, this one made Tuesday by Major League Baseball to put the Miami Marlins’ season on pause through Sunday in the wake of a coronavirus outbreak that has infected half the team.
But what’s next? Does the Marlins’ season return to normalcy next week? Do test results until then suggest their season is safe — or done?
Even Marlins CEO Derek Jeter’s simple statement that the stuck-in-Philadelphia Marlins “look forward to safely returning to Miami where we conducted a successful and healthy Spring 2.0” looks in question.
Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez says a 14-day quarantine of the entire Marlins traveling party is in order when they return as per protocol of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“The governor issued an order mandating a 14-day quarantine for people coming from identified hot spots,” Gimenez said in a text. “As such, anyone coming from a hot spot needs to quarantine for 14 days, unless exempted by the governor.”
Philadelphia might not be a hot spot. But the Marlins roster looks like one with 15 or 30 players testing positive for COVID-19.
If they’re quarantined, or if baseball demands a longer shutdown, how to make up a quarter of a 60-game season? You don’t. You can’t. That’s the nightmare scenario the Marlins could be facing now. And to think, it all started so nicely by winning two of three in Philadelphia and sitting in first place in the NL East. Hey, at least they could go out on top, right?
They’re the story of baseball, because their story goes beyond baseball. It’s beyond sports. It’s about how a nation should deal with the virus. Ask yourself this: If 15 of the 30 people in your office had the virus, would you feel comfortable working there?
The better decision than pausing the Marlins season on Tuesday would have been doing that last Sunday when four Marlins had tested positive. That would have suggested baseball had a big-picture plan for what to do when confronted with an outbreak and spared more exposure to Marlins and Phillies.
Still, at least this pause is some
thing.
“I’m pleased to see MLB finally taking things seriously,” said Dr. Zach Binney, an epidemiologist at Oxford College of Emory University. “I suspect they’ll have to end up suspending their games longer — maybe another week — but this is a good start. What to do after Sunday will depend on how tests come back over the next few days.
“The Marlins do need to make sure that everyone is quarantining individually, and there’s very little, if any, face-to-face contact between members of the traveling party. This is to stop the virus from spreading further over the next few days.”
Binney advises shutting down the season for two weeks to give the virus a chance to, “clear out of the locker room, make sure sure no incubating infections or anything like that before you get back to play.”
Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred suggested in a statement the game had things under control. It said the pause will allow the Marlins “time to focus on providing care for their players and planning their Baseball Operations for a resumption early next week.”
That’s if it’s ready to resume next week. If the roster is healthy enough. If the full support staff is ready to go. If in fact Gimenez doesn’t press for a 14-day quarantine as he understands the governor to demand.
Safety aside — if you can do that here — how would the Marlins even field a real team? They’d have to compose their roster of players stashed in Jupiter. That’s if the ones sitting there are deemed safe to play.
“An outbreak like this was totally foreseeable,” Binney said. “I was suggesting it ever since MLB put out a plan that doesn’t involve a bubble. If you have players and staff living at home with family and going into the community, if there’s a lot of virus in the area, it’s probably going to get into the team.”
“In terms of what comes next or MLB season at large, I’d say what we need is a swift investigation into what he heck happened. What this risky behavior of Marlins players and staff, like going out into a bar? Were MLB’s provisions insufficient or its protocol not adhered to? Finding out what went wrong is the next step.”
Now some good news.
Those sports in bubbles, Binney thinks, will fare much better. He pointed to the men’s and women’s soccer leagues that played tournaments in bubbles as faring well. The NBA and NHL are, “working great — honestly better than I could have expected. That’s showing you the bubble plan works.”
Then there’s baseball and football, with no such plans.
“The NFL, right now, their plan is similar to Major League Baseball, and the NFL has more people and more contact,” he said. “To me, that suggests if a case does get in [to a team], the virus is likely to spread more quickly and more widely than you saw with the Marlins.”
That’s for the coming days. For now, baseball made the easy decision on the Marlins. It paused the season until Sunday. It’s a start of the decision-making, not a finish, with the next step being if this season goes on at all.