We may may be only a few days, if not a few hours, from writing off this year’s Major League Baseball season. Particularly if this is the kind of behavior we can expect.
Major League Baseball's season is less than a week old, but one team has already experienced a coronavirus outbreak that will sideline a chunk of its roster and has caused a game to be canceled. The Miami Marlins, who had four players test positive during their opening series against the Philadelphia Phillies, had an additional eight players and two coaches test positive on Monday, less than 12 hours before they were supposed to play their home opener against the Baltimore Orioles, according to ESPN's Jeff Passan.
To be clear, four Marlins players had already tested positive for Covid-19, and yet the team was allowed to play against the Phillies on Sunday, who were apparently not advised that the Marlins team had been infected until Philadelphia players already en route to the ballpark were sent text messages to that effect. Then, the next day, eight more Marlins tested positive, along with two Marlins coaches.
How do you think the Phillies, or the local people that provide the hands-on logistical support for these games, must feel about that?
Craig Calcaterra, writing for NBC Sports poses some obvious questions for MLB Commissioner, Rob Manfred:
As we noted earlier today, Rob Manfred and Rob Manfred alone has the power to cancel games or shut down operations if COVID-19 begins to pose a serious risk to players and those surrounding them. Yesterday the Marlins took the field despite more than 10% of their active roster having already tested positive and despite the fact that the results of several COVID-19 tests for their teammates remained outstanding. How many of those players had close contact with Phillies players? With stadium staff? With bus drivers? With hotel staff? Why, when a big chunk of the roster was already positive and more tests were outstanding, were they allowed to circulate freely like this? These are questions Rob Manfred is morally and ethically obligated to address. This is especially true given that multiple epidemiologists characterized the decision to allow the Marlins to play yesterday as irresponsible even before knowing how many more players had been infected.
(emphasis supplied)
This already has the hallmarks of a developing scandal, particularly since the motivation for keeping these games going forward is likely something a lot less noble or altruistic than simple love of “America’s pastime.” As Calcaterra wrote on Monday:
There has been no suggestion from the league that there is anything amiss. Indeed, based on how erratic testing turnaround has been and how unevenly players, coaches and umpires have been adhering to the rules about distancing in the early going — there have been a lot of high fives and a lot of spitting — Major League Baseball seems to be treating its own COVID-19 rules as broad suggestions rather than anything approaching hard and fast guidelines. As Rosenthal put it over the weekend, the league seems to view those rules as a “living document” which can adapt and change as the league sees fit.
One interpretation of that is that his is a reasonable response to a constantly-altering landscape. That the league realizes and accepts that there are as many if not more unknowns as knowns when it comes to pandemic baseball and that it only makes sense to remain flexible. A more cynical interpretation is that Major League Baseball is intent on playing this season come Hell or high water and it’ll do whatever it can in order to make that happen, even if that means looking the other way as best practices for health and safety are not vigilantly enforced.
It looks like the country’s professional sports conglomerates are about to come face to face with the reality of a virus that just doesn’t care how much money is at stake.
And one more thing for Americans to ponder: