League is playing this all wrong
How many will opt out of season after Marlins outbreak? If, indeed, there is a season
Not just bread but circuses too.
Which, in every age of man — and woman — has meant sports.
Call it diversion or avarice, it was entirely reasonable, desirable, for professional sports in North America to resume the games, even amid a global pandemic and the potential for contagion.
Unlike hockey and basketball, baseball can’t be played in a bubble, however. There is no ballpark or cluster of ballparks than can accommodate 30 teams around the clock, as NHL clubs have been divided between two hub cities.
So, Major League Baseball already faced a unique dilemma, likely to be duplicated when the NFL launches what it claims will be a “regular” season. And the risk of transmission is far lower in an outdoor environment, which baseball has going for it.
But MLB should have foreseen some obvious crises looming when it rolled out plans for a truncated 60-game schedule and full post-season. Most specifically, an obligation to keep teams — travelling or at home — as far away as possible from danger zones such as Florida and Texas and California. Though it should be noted that the coronavirus is a moving and opportunistic target. Even a month ago, many states believed they’d come through the eye of the storm, some far more COVID-19 ravaged than others. Now the second wave has circled back or dug its claws into regions which had scarcely seen any infection.
Baseball should have quit Florida, especially, right from the get-go, even if that required big-league teams to relocate at affiliated minor-league ballparks far from the coronavirus fury, as the Toronto Blue Jays have been forced to do. That would actually have ensured a more level playing field. As well, players should have been restricted to vigorously sanitized venues, from stadiums to hotels and transportation between the two, rather than permitting them to live at home, which might easily expose them to community transmission.
Of course, the incorrigible can’t be 100 per cent shielded from their own worst instincts. Los Angeles Clippers guard Lou Williams, who had permission to slip the bonds of the NBA’s Disney World bubble for a funeral, was photographed at a strip club and will miss games during a 10-day quarantine.
As of this writing, it is not yet known how at least 13 Miami Marlins players and staff contracted COVID-19, which forced the postponement of their home opener Monday against Baltimore. And, with the concentric ripple effect, the simultaneous adjournment — or cancellation, who the hell really knows how MLB will contend with this mess — of the Phillies hosting the Yankees, because the New York squad would have followed the Marlins into that contaminated visitors’ clubhouse. The Blue Jays were scheduled to arrive there on Friday. Toronto’s first “home” series — after three weeks on the road, because of their particular circumstances — is against the Marlins at Buffalo’s Sahlen Field on Aug. 11.
Before landing in Philadelphia, the Marlins had played exhibition games in Atlanta. The Marlins travelling party remains in Philadelphia, selfquarantining and awaiting results from another round of testing.
It took four months for baseball, after pressing pause on spring training in March, to come this far and a mere 72 hours for the whole kit ’n’ kaboodle to blow up.
In the past week, only four players and two staff members had tested positive, 99 positive (84 players) since intake screening began on June 27 — 0.3 per cent from among 32,640 samples as of Friday, per MLB. Twenty-eight teams, including the Blue Jays, have had at least one positive test since then.
But everybody was aware the crunch would come in-season, with teams travelling farther distances, passing through each other’s visitors clubhouses (and expanded facilities for physical distancing) and mostly removing masks when on the field.
Every single person in baseball, from front-office executive to taxi-squad understudy, has insisted that health and safety were core mandates. How to explain, then, that at least three Marlins who’d tested positive took the field on Sunday at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, two days after another teammate had tested positive, although the Phillies reportedly had been made aware, perhaps explaining why all-star outfielder Bryce Harper — who’s expressed leeriness from the start — donned a mask afield for the first time?
This was not merely a “mistake,” as Marlins manager Don Mattingly has admitted, with baseball stumbling through protocols as it tries to find its footing in a strange world where infection might lurk just around the corner. Yet Mattingly said the team never considered not playing. That was flagrant disregard for the well-being of every player in the game.
Now baseball holds its breath to see whether any Phillies test positive, too. It was a first, but it won’t be a last. It is the proverbial slippery slope. More than any other sport, the rhythm of baseball is day to day. Running face-first into COVID-19, now it’s hour to hour.
There was never much doubt that a baseball team would be struck. What’s not clarified is how MLB will handle the reality of its worst nightmare come to life.
A conference call between commissioner Rob Manfred and all team owners was held on Monday morning. Later, Manfred told MLB Network that, pending test results, the Marlins could be back on the field as soon as Wednesday: “Obviously, we don’t want any player to get exposed. It’s not a positive thing. But I don’t see it as a nightmare.”
Players would be foolhardy not to fear these circumstances. How many more will now decide to opt out of the season? If, indeed, there is a season after all because at the moment that decision is hanging fire. This early crossroad may very well signify the termination of baseball — the sport where both ownership and the players association agreed that a contained bubble format was untenable. And, of course, where way too much time was wasted wrangling over money and season length.
In Washington, where the Jays opened a four-game series on Monday night — a pair as the “away” team — outfielder Juan Soto had been held out of the opening day lineup last Thursday after testing positive for the virus. According to MLB’s coronavirus operations manual, any player who tests positive must have two negative tests at least 24 hours apart before they’re allowed to return, even to use club facilities.
Received wisdom would suggest COVID-19 had seized the Marlins, or at least Player Zero Marlin, before they departed Florida because it takes several days for symptoms to appear and a person can be asymptomatic even whilst infected. While nothing has been confirmed, it would seem the Marlins brought the virus with them, from a state with the second-highest infection rate in America — 424,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 5,853 deaths.
The picture is grim, within and without baseball in the U.S. At this point, however, the Marlins aren’t MLB-nongrata. Despite nearly half the roster testing positive, they still have enough personnel to field a team because teams have been authorized to dip into their 60-player pool to start the season, allowed to promote replacements from among their scrubs at the spring training complex in … Jupiter, Fla.
Love of baseball may not be enough to carry the game, in any recognizable version, through the COVID obstacle course of the next two months.
In a July 1 interview, Manfred told radio host Dan Patrick that the league would have to consider whether to continue operating in the face of an outbreak. “If we have a team or two that’s really decimated with a number of people who had the virus and can’t play for any significant period of time, it could have a real impact on the competition, and we’ve have to think very, very hard about what we’re doing.”
Does baseball actually have a damn clue what it’s doing?