Bloom on Sox outbreak: ‘It’s gut-wrenching’
Now seven players have tested positive for virus
As the Red Sox dealt with yet another positive COVID19 test on Wednesday — with Yairo Munoz becoming the latest — the outbreak had already started taking its toll and weighing heavy on the top of the organization.
Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom admitted he’s had some sleepless nights this week as a new positive test comes up almost every day. He wonders if the organization could have done more to educate the team, but they’ve done all they can and it still couldn’t prevent this outbreak from happening.
“It’s gut-wrenching,” Bloom said. “How else can you react? Every single one has been. We try to go to great lengths to keep these sorts of things from happening, and then to see what’s happening now, it’s really hard. This goes beyond baseball.
“We feel and I certainly feel in the chair I sit in a lot of responsibility to every single person in our traveling party and our organization. When our powers to prevent something like this from happening and continuing to happen only go so far, that’s a bad feeling.”
But how did this happen, with seven players and two coaches testing positive for COVID-19 since last Friday, and the potential for more to come? Bloom wishes he knew.
“I think if we could pinpoint exactly why, it would’ve been easier to prevent,” Bloom said. “I don’t know that we’ll ever know exactly why. It’s obviously something from day one that we’ve been very concerned about, that we’ve worried about, we’ve known it was possible, but I wish we knew exactly why this happened and why it happened when it happened.”
There seems to be a prevailing thought that because the Red Sox are still one of six teams in baseball who have not reached the 85% vaccination threshold, that unvaccinated players have started this outbreak. But Bloom said the majority of the nine who have tested positive are breakthrough cases, and though he’s an advocate for getting vaccinated, there’s no way of telling that it would have had an effect on the events that have transpired.
“I wish everybody in our organization were vaccinated and for that matter, everybody, period, who’s eligible,” Bloom said. “I’m a strong proponent of vaccination and so is our organization. Every person in this organization that isn’t vaccinated pains me. We know that the delta variant is a different animal. And even against the delta variant, the data do suggest that vaccination still helps. That’s why we are strong proponents of it.
“At the same time, even though that’s true in the aggregate, in terms of this specific situation, we have a lot of breakthrough infections. There’s no real way to know if it would’ve been different if we had a higher vaccination rate or not. In this case, I don’t know if that’s knowable, and it doesn’t seem that helpful to play the what-if game.”
Bloom said that a blanket vaccine mandate has not been created — only those who work in the office are required to be vaccinated — but it’s something they’ll continue to monitor and consider moving forward.
“We respect that this is a changing picture, that people have questions, they have rights, but also that we are all interconnected in this society,” Bloom said. “We’re all interconnected in this organization. We’re a family, and we have to have each other’s back, and we have to always be looking at what that means in terms of something like vaccination.”
As their roster becomes more and more depleted by the day, the Red Sox will continue to play. Bloom said there has been no discussion between the team and Major League Baseball about the possibility of postponements or cancellations.
“It’s just not our call,” Bloom said. “We’re expecting to play.”
That means they’ll need to find a way to field a roster every night no matter the circumstances. And in the middle of a playoff race — entering September with a one-game lead for the second wild card spot — that task becomes more challenging. On Wednesday night, with most of their middle infield regulars out because of COVID, they were forced to start Jack Lopez at second base for his major-league debut, alongside Jonathan Arauz at shortstop.
Bloom admitted that fielding a competitive team over the final month is a valid concern.
“Obviously that gets tougher with every successive positive case that we’ve had,” Bloom said. “It’s part of why we emphasize depth. You guys have heard me say that probably since the day I showed up here. You’ve probably also heard me say 50 or 100 times that we’re not where we’d like to be. I don’t know that we ever actually will feel like we can check that box, but it’s situations like this that make it so important to layer depth upon depth. Obviously, it’s a concern. It also provides an opportunity for guys to step up.”