Rob Manfred: MLB not facing ‘nightmare’ scenario despite Marlins’ positive COVID-19 tests
Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said he is still optimistic the shortened 2020 season will be played to completion even after the Miami Marlins had 13 members of their organization, including 11 players, test positive for COVID-19 over the past four days and prompted the Marlins’ two-game home series against the Baltimore Orioles to be postponed.
“Obviously, we don’t want any player to get exposed,” Manfred said in a 10-minute interview on MLB Network on Monday night. “It’s not a positive thing. But I don’t see it as a nightmare. We built the protocols to allow us to continue to play.”
The Marlins’ traveling party is “self-quarantining in place” at their team hotel in Philadelphia, where they wrapped up a three-game series against the Phillies on Sunday, while waiting for the results of additional COVID-19 testing administered Monday morning.
The rapid tests take about 12-24 hours to produce results. Manfred said MLB expects to have the results “late, late” Monday night and will likely have an update on the possibility of the Marlins’ ability to continue their season at some point Tuesday. Manfred said the league has “some theories as to what might have happened” that resulted in the outbreak of positive tests among the Marlins but “nothing definitive at this point.”
The Marlins were supposed to host the Orioles on Monday and Tuesday at Marlins Park before heading to Baltimore for another two-game series on Wednesday and Thursday. Manfred did not rule out the possibility of doubleheaders being played in Baltimore should the Marlins be cleared to play.
“If the testing results are acceptable,” Manfred said, “the Marlins will resume play in Baltimore on Wednesday against the Orioles.”
Manfred also touched on a slew of other topics during his recorded interview with Tom Verducci. Among them:
▪ Why the Marlins’ game on Sunday was able to take place after three players were found to have tested positive the morning of the game: “Well I think really what happened was there was testing on Friday and one positive on Saturday. [There was] testing again on Saturday and the three additional positives on Sunday. What then happened under the protocols was we did contact tracing on all four positives. There was, I think, a small number of players who met the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] guidelines. They were quarantined. We ordered additional testing. We did symptom checks. We did temperature checks and decided to proceed with the game on Sunday.”
Manfred said that simply being teammates and in the same clubhouse alone don’t necessarily meet the requirements for close contact that would require someone to have to quarantine.
“There’s a distance requirement as well as a duration requirement,” Manfred said.
▪ On what it would take for Manfred to temporarily shut down a team: “I think that a team losing a number of players that rendered it completely non-competitive would be an issue that we would have to address and have to think about making a change. Whether that was shutting down a part of the season [or] the whole season, that depends on the circumstances. Same thing with respect to league-wide. If you get to a certain point league-wide where it does become a health threat, we certainly would shut down at that point.”
▪ On why MLB did not go with a “bubble” plan like the NBA, NHL or MLS: “I think the decision that we made with respect to the bubble was the right one. We’re different than other sports. We would have had to have multiple locations, probably, just in order to have enough facilities to make it work. The numbers of people involved and the numbers of people to support the number of players was much, much larger in our sport. The duration would have been much longer, and the longer you go, the more people you have and the less likely it is that you can make the bubble work. I think the NBA and the NHL have an advantage. Smaller numbers of players, shorter period of time. I understand why they did what they did. I’m just not sure it was workable for us.”
▪ On what he has learned through the first few days of the regular season about dealing with the coronavirus and how the league has to adapt: “We have made adjustments to the protocols on an ongoing basis. There were conversations today with the MLBPA about what we should be doing in terms of the protocols themselves and the enforcement of the protocols, making sure that we’re following them in every way we possibly can. As I said earlier, it’s an evolving situation, and we continue to reevaluate where we are in the protocols and what we can do to keep the players as safe as possible.”
This story was originally published July 27, 2020 at 7:39 PM.
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