MLB STRUGGLING TO NAVIGATE ‘NIGHTMARE’ START TO SEASON
Series postponements only compound league’s growing woes with COVID-19
Rarely does a bad idea get proven to be so with this much haste.
But then, Major League Baseball’s plan for a 2020 season was an exceptionally bad idea.
Rob Manfred, in an interview on the friendly MLB Network on Tuesday, declared that the COVID -19 outbreak on the Miami Marlins was “not in the nightmare category.” The MLB commissioner said this while the Marlins had 14 players and staff test positive for the virus, causing Manfred to scrub the team from the schedule for the time being.
More positive tests have since been confirmed among the Marlins, bringing the total to 19, including more than half of the opening-day roster. On Thursday afternoon came news that the Philadelphia Phillies are suspending all activities at Citizens Bank Park after two positive tests in that organization, identified only as a coach and a clubhouse staffer. The Phillies were supposed to be playing the New York Yankees this week, but those games had already been postponed so Philadelphia could undergo more testing, having just played the Marlins. The Toronto Blue Jays were supposed to play a doubleheader on Saturday in Philadelphia, having pushed back a planned Friday start to give the Phillies more time to clear tests, but that series is now also postponed.
The baseball season is not yet a week old, and so far the teams with changed dates and schedules include the Marlins, Phillies, Yankees, Jays, Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles, who ended up just playing the Yankees since they had nothing better to do. The Jays might end up playing the Nationals again since neither team has anything better to do.
At this point, the best way to finish the baseball season would be to just have every team stay in the city in which they are presently situated and have them play the same opponent 55 more times. It’s not like there was much integrity in the geographically lopsided 60-game schedule to begin with.
When the Marlins story exploded on Monday, it seemed wild that MLB would suggest a team so crippled by COVID tests could carry on from a competitive sense. But it quickly became apparent that the league would attempt to soldier on, which Manfred confirmed in that MLB Network interview, explaining that the point of the expanded rosters and the taxi squads implemented in this brief season was to allow organizations to continue to field a team even during an outbreak. This rather helpfully underscored that MLB’s safety protocols weren’t primarily about preventing the spread of the virus among teams, but about allowing games to continue despite the inevitable infections that would take place.
There’s a strange, cold logic to that: because MLB’s plan had no mechanism to prevent players and staff from circulating in the same cities where the pandemic is uncontrolled, all while travelling between them, there was bound to be positive cases among those players. While other leagues are tightly restricting the movements and contacts of their players and staff, MLB has basically said, “You be careful out there!” This naturally brings positive cases, and extra bodies are required to jump in and fill those spots.
But as much as there is a grim comedy in watching a bad Marlins team try to muddle its way through an outbreak, the situation with the Phillies must have even Manfred reconsidering his opinion on nightmares. It was at least possible that the Philadelphia players and staff could have come out on the other side of their encounter with the Marlins unscathed. On the field, the teams only have brief contact with one another, in a big, open stadium. And as recently as a few days ago, news of a couple of positive tests among non-playing Phillies wouldn’t have necessarily led to postponements.
But the experience with the Marlins, where one positive test turned to four to 14 to 19 in a matter of days, has meant the Phillies (and their opponents) are on hold while they wait to see if they also have an outbreak. This makes sense, given the lag between when a person is infected and when they might return a positive result, but it also shows that the whole MLB plan to have replacement players at the ready was useless from the start. The idea was to have the healthy guys swapped in while positive cases were isolated, but already — again, it has been less than a week! — that has been replaced by shutting the whole team down.
We’ve long wondered, since MLB was careful to avoid setting such public targets, how many players could be put on the COVID list before a team would be forced to forfeit games. But it turns out that the better question was how many teams could be shut down by COVID before the league was forced to forfeit the season. The answer so far is: more than two.