Major League Baseball is just six days away from its one-season pandemic edition, a workout to the extent that it mitigates a new coronavirus.
From Sunday to Tuesday, 15 Miami Marlins tested positive for COVID-19, which led MLB to suspend the team’s season until at least Sunday while following the schedules of five teams, the kind of red alert scheduled when this gambit was introduced.
So what did the commissioner say about it on the league-owned network?
“I don’t see it as a nightmare,” Rob Manfred said Monday night, a day before putting the Marlins on a break. “We created the protocols to allow us to keep playing.”
That’s a view on that. On the other hand, we head to the Washington Nationals, who have noticed that their weekend parties are held through the virus, have noticed that Miami-Dade County’s COVID-19 positivity rate is around 20% in recent weeks and have organized an impromptu team assembly related to their miami series.
The vote was almost unanimous: the Nationals, although everyone voted one of their players and coaches, would not go to Miami.
The vote reached the public just hours before MLB announced the suspension of the Marlins’ calendar. This is just one of many attempts and attempts to complete this season.
Uncertainty. Chaos, sometimes. Joy where you can. And empathy for the less fortunate in this experience, even if it is a divisional opponent.
“We believe MLB has done the right thing,” nationals manager Dave Martinez said, moments after the postponement was announced. “I feel bad about what’s going on with the Marlins. I hope those boys get better soon and can come back and play.
“I heard rumors from players who had concerns, so I sought to communicate it. We voted and it was probably not safe to go.”
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These rumors have come to the league office, and trust that there are other deaf roars in the primary sports league that ask their groups and players to cross the regions and bounce off the coronavirus hot spots in the call to entertain the masses (and, yes, get paid). ).
The Orioles finished a winning streak in Boston on Sunday, flew to Miami before their series against the Marlins and woke up On Monday morning clearly.
He reports that a series of positive tests between the Marlins circulated online before Orioles manager Brandon Hyde could finish his breakfast in the room. Then come hours of limbo, a particularly hellish position for athletes who know they have to get up for a game, but they also know that everything can be in vain.
All this in the context of knowing that his teammates in the game, adding his 2019 teammate Jonathan Villar, were in poor health or quarantined.
“It’s a sense of unease,” said Hyde, the Orioles’ sophomore and member of the Marlins organization from 2005 to 2011.
They all lead to the big unanswered that only Manfred can answer:
When is it too much?
113-page fitness and protection protocols involve tens of thousands of words about how to start games, but none about how to cancel everything. Less than a general insurrection of players, this force belongs only to Manfred, who in the wake of the Marlins epidemic explained to Tom Verducci of MLB Network how it looks.
“A team that wastes a number of players that makes it absolutely uncompetitive is something we’ll have to face,” he said Monday. “Let’s make it a disruptive component of the season, all season long. You get to a safe spot in the league where it becomes a threat to fitness, and we’d close at that point.”
So far, more than a hundred players have tested positive since this summer, and more than 75 of them have given permission for percentage of their health. Freddie Freeman, Scott Kingery and Cubs pitching coach Tommy Hottovy detailed heartbreaking, sweat-soaked battles with COVID-19.
Red Sox ace Eduardo Rodriguez “recovered” from the virus to be diagnosed with myocarditis after having difficulty breathing during a workout. Dozens of other players have not returned, some of them a month after giving positive, which makes one wonder if they are the vagaries of generating back-to-back negative tests or something more terrible.
And then the Marlins, a low-budget club that has noticed many of their most important players, the box player Miguel Rojas, the catcher Jorge Alfaro, the pitcher José Ureña, among the list of 15 men who will be off the list during the top of August.
Still, the display will continue. MLB has invented its concept of an “alternative education site” so that clubs can buy minor leaguers, non-aligned players and other veterans willing to play in a different place than those in the major leagues for the same reason.
The alternating-Marlins, apparently, were in contact with the inflamed Marlins. So, the “next man” philosophy you hear after an NFL player has been scratched into the box with a debilitating injury will now be rolled out on a baseball list.
The Marlins will want at least 15 players, of course, and a full team of 30 men if they want to take quarantine seriously after players have been exposed, if not in close contact with inflamed players.
It’s scary, isn’t it?
And yet MLB is not when it cites knowledge that indicates that the other 29 groups did not report positive control in this cycle. Strange as it is to play a dozen games at night when a team has noticed that part of their team has been wiped out, the knowledge is correct.
As far as everyone knew, it was safe to do so.
“I heard players say the safest position they feel is Target Field,” Twins Baseball Operations Chairman Derek Falvey said in a video call ahead of his club’s opening game Tuesday. “No positive case of our first road trip. We went through a trip, through an exhibition beyond the target field.
“We’ll have to stay alert.”
Falvey and 28 other groups hope to pass on to the school what happened to the Marlins, where the breach occurred and how it spread and how this may have been avoided in their own environment.
“It would be a lie if I said it’s not a little scary to see what would happen,” he says, “but we just want to be a lot more attentive to long-term protocols.”
And so the screen continues, with the viability of this season almost measurable in a graphic.
Track the number of postponed games, the number of positive tests, the number of alignments what in many years would be generously called a Triple-A list and see where the trend line goes.
Playing ball? Course. But for how long?
“It’s a question about the kind of major league union commissioner,” says Charlie Montoyo, director of the Toronto Blue Jays, whose team is an off-road team after Canada gave them the boot and Buffalo is still not in a position to welcome them. “Everything they need to do.”
A query that goes unanswered, even with a team on the track and almost out. After all, we still don’t know how much they’re willing to take.
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