The return of Major League Baseball took a troubling turn on Monday when the league’s worst fear became reality: an outbreak of positive coronavirus tests within a team.
The Miami Marlins postponed their home opener against the Baltimore Orioles on Monday — four days after the season opener — after learning that 14 members of the team’s traveling party, including two coaches, had tested positive for the virus. The outbreak was first reported by ESPN.
“The health of our players and staff has been and will continue to be our primary focus as we navigate through these uncharted waters,” Derek Jeter, the Marlins’ chief executive, said in a statement. “After a successful Spring 2.0, we have now experienced challenges once we went on the road and left Miami. Postponing tonight’s home opener was the correct decision to ensure we take a collective pause and try to properly grasp the totality of this situation.”
Jeter said the Marlins would remain in Philadelphia, where they played three games against the Phillies over the weekend, while awaiting the results of another round of testing for players and staff. The Phillies were scheduled to host the Yankees on Monday, but that game was also postponed.
The Marlins played two exhibition games in Atlanta last week before their series at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, including Sunday’s series finale, which was played after Miami learned that four players had tested positive. Manager Don Mattingly changed starting pitchers for that game — replacing Jose Urena, who had reportedly tested positive — but told reporters later that the team “never really considered not playing.”
As games began for most teams on Friday, M.L.B. announced that only six of 10,939 samples it had conducted that week (or .05 percent) had been new positives. But most of those tests had been conducted while teams were training at their home parks, before traveling to road sites.
The league is attempting to stage a 60-game season using 30 stadiums across the United States, including a Class AAA ballpark in Buffalo for the Toronto Blue Jays, who were barred from playing home games by the Canadian government because of the risk of travel to and from the United States.
Baseball’s decision to play games at home sites stands apart from the N.B.A. and the N.H.L., which are preparing to resume play in so-called bubbles. The N.B.A. is housing players and holding games at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla., while the N.H.L. is using two sites: Toronto for Eastern Conference teams and Edmonton for teams in the Western Conference.
Those leagues are also using fewer teams than M.L.B.; both were deep into their seasons when sports shut down in mid-March, so the N.H.L. plans to move directly to the playoffs, with 24 of 31 teams taking part, while the N.B.A. plan involves 22 of its 30 teams.
In an interview with The New York Times in May, Rob Manfred, the M.L.B. commissioner, outlined the challenges of where and how to stage a season.
“One of the things that floated up from one of the experts is, ‘Gee whiz, a way that you can do this is to quarantine players,’” Manfred said, adding later, “And then you’re going to start a four-and-a-half-month season, and your life is going to be hotel to ballpark, back to hotel, room service, not see your family.
“So then we realized, gee, that’s pretty tough. So then we started talking about including families, and you realize as you get into that phase that you get into quarantine numbers that are insane.”
Manfred said M.L.B. considered holding games in three hubs: Arizona for teams in the West divisions, Texas for teams in the Central and Florida for teams in the East.
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“That makes sense because those states seem to be more receptive to letting us play,” Manfred said.
But as baseball considered that plan, the spread of the virus ebbed in some parts of the country, and businesses began to reopen. Baseball then shifted its focus to playing in stadiums with no fans while following extensive health and safety protocols. To reduce travel, teams would play only within their geographic divisions.
Yet reduced travel is still travel, with all it entails — flights, bus rides, checking in and out of hotels, hauling equipment from clubhouse to clubhouse, and so on — and even as the league prepared to start play, it understood the risk of positive tests. Some of the official safety rules seemed unrealistic and have been routinely broken, such as the ban on high-fiving and spitting, strict social distancing in the dugout and replacing any ball touched by multiple players.
With player availability inevitably in flux because of the virus, teams are carrying 30 active players (instead of the usual 26), with a pool of 30 additional players available at an alternate training site near home ballparks.
But the idea was to provide coverage for a stray absence or two, not an outbreak like the one the Marlins are experiencing. The league has known all along that such an outcome could be devastating.
“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,” Manfred said July 2 on “The Dan Patrick Show.” “And we’d have to think very, very hard about what we’re doing.”
That day has arrived quickly, giving Manfred and the owners a new crisis to confront on their scheduled weekly phone call on Monday afternoon.
James Wagner contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/sports/baseball/marlins-game-canceled.html
2020-07-27 19:00:00Z
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