Marlins playing again after COVID-19 outbreak. They know they ‘cannot make any mistakes’
Miami Marlins players made their way to the field at Oriole Park at Camden Yards in groups Tuesday like they would to get ready for any other game.
But there were some small yet noticeable differences to their pre-game setup.
The sheer amount of new faces was a start. Seventeen, to be exact. They were officially added to the active roster about two hours before first pitch to replace players who tested positive for COVID-19 over an eight-day span starting hours before the Marlins’ season opener against the Philadelphia Phillies on July 24 that temporarily paused the Marlins’ season for a week. They went to the field in waves with their respective position groups.
The relievers trotted to left field first, like usual, and spent 30-plus minutes playing catch and warming up their arms while pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre Jr. watched along. They practiced in small groups, limiting the amount of players out in the area at any given time.
Monte Harrison, one of those 17 new faces, then stepped out of the dugout beyond the third-base line with outfielders coach Billy Hatcher. Both wore masks as they went to center field, where Harrison started running sprints back toward the third-base line. About 90 minutes from that moment, he would make his MLB debut in center field and batting ninth in the Marlins’ lineup.
More position players followed, that group relatively unscathed by the the clubhouse’s coronavirus outbreak.
And then, at 8:16 p.m., Jonathan Villar stepped into the box to face Baltimore Orioles All-Star John Means. Two hours and 38 minutes later, the Marlins walked off the field with a 4-0 win. Francisco Cervelli and Jesus Aguilar hit home runs. Pablo Lopez dazzled for five innings.
“This one felt good,” Marlins manager Don Mattingly said.
It underscored the moment: For the first time in nine days, after pondering what might happen to their season while quarantined in a Philadelphia hotel, the Marlins played a live game, starting a three-day, four-game series against the Orioles.
The Marlins don’t plan to take this chance for granted.
“We’ve been given an opportunity to hit the reset button,” Marlins CEO Derek Jeter said, “and moving forward we just cannot make any mistakes.”
After all, it was mistakes, lapses in judgment, that put them in their current position, that resulted in their eight days of limbo leading up to Tuesday, that created a problem bigger than figuring out who will be in their lineup or who will be on the mound on any given day.
As the Marlins resumed their season Tuesday, a resumption delayed 41 minutes because the team had to wait at their hotel for a few inconclusive COVID-19 test results to come back in order to get clearance from MLB, they did so with more than half of their Opening Day roster quarantining in South Florida.
Eighteen players and two coaches contracted the novel coronavirus, leaving the Marlins without three of their five original starting pitchers (including Opening Day starter Sandy Alcantara, Caleb Smith and Jose Urena), eight of their original 12 relievers, their starting shortstop Miguel Rojas, their starting catcher Jorge Alfaro, two outfielders, one of their backup catchers in Chad Wallach and a utility infielder in Sean Rodriguez. Second baseman Isan Diaz also opted out of the season.
At least two players, Rojas and outfielder Harold Ramirez, said they’ve experienced mild symptoms including fever and cough. The majority of the group has been asymptomatic. Jeter expects most if not all of the 18 to rejoin the team at some point this season.
The Marlins became Major League Baseball’s first case study on how to handle a coronavirus outbreak as the league attempts to play a 60-game season in the shadow of a pandemic that has infected nearly five million people and claimed more than 158,000 lives in the United States alone.
The league adjusted on the fly as nearly five dozen members of the Marlins organization isolated in two hotels in Philadelphia for a week. Miami impacted five other teams in the process. Schedules were re-written. Additional health and safety protocols have been put in place.
“We have to be more careful now,” said catcher Jorge Alfaro, the first of the 18 Marlins player to test positive, “because we know how this can affect the season for us and for everybody.”
‘They let their guard down’
Jeter said the Marlins couldn’t pinpoint the exact origin of the outbreak. Alfaro said he didn’t know he had contracted the virus until he received the positive test July 24.
But the situation appeared to magnify in Atlanta, where the team played a pair of exhibition games against the Braves on July 21 and 22 before heading to Philadelphia to start the season.
The Marlins felt good about their routine heading into their first road trip. They went through three weeks of practice in Miami, a COVID-19 hotbed, without returning a single new positive test.
(One player did test positive during the league’s intake screen and three others from their 60-player roster pool had contracted the virus prior to the team reporting for practice).
Jeter said the team was lax with the league’s protocols on the road following that successful lead-up to the season, and it proved costly.
“What it boiled down to on this particular trip was guys were around each other, they got relaxed and they let their guard down,” Jeter said. “They were getting together in groups. They weren’t wearing masks as much as they should have. They weren’t social distancing.”
A few also left the hotel, too, although Jeter quickly shut down the possibility that any sort of nightlife was involved.
“There was no salacious activity,” Jeter said. “There was no hanging at bars. No clubs. No running around Atlanta. No running around the town.”
According to two sources, the Marlins and at least one player told MLB investigators that two Marlins went out in Atlanta to visit with a former teammate. But that former teammate tested negative for COVID-19, so there’s no evidence it would have contributed to the Marlins’ outbreak.
Jeter also said a couple players left for small things such as buying coffee and clothes.
Regardless, the travel section of MLB’s operations manual for the 2020 season states that members of a team’s travel party “should avoid leaving the Club hotel for non-essential purposes, and should not congregate in public areas of the hotel, for any reason unless approved in advance by appropriate Club personnel.”
So while the offenses were minimal on their own, they were enough to put the Marlins at risk for the COVID-19 outbreak that ultimately came.
“We’re battling something that’s invisible here,” Jeter said. “You can’t see it. You don’t know where it starts. You don’t know how it gets there but once it gets there, it has an opportunity to spread quickly. And we’ve seen that.”
It started with one positive test, Alfaro, on July 24, the day the Marlins opened their season against the Philadelphia Phillies at Citizens Bank Park. The Marlins put him on the injured list about three hours before first pitch. No official reason was given at the time because teams do not have to publicly disclose on transactions if players are being added to the IL for something related to COVID-19.
Three more positive tests surfaced two days later, hours before the Marlins headed to the ballpark and wrapped up their three game series against the Phillies on July 26 with an 11-6 win. The Marlins and Phillies were given the all-clear to play after MLB went through a contact tracing process to determine if other Marlins players might have been in close enough contact with the three who tested positive to be at risk for exposure. By the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines, that’s someone who was within six feet of a person who tested positive for more than 10 minutes.
“Those guys [who tested positive] did not go to the ballpark,” Jeter said. “Those guys stayed back at the hotel. And it’s not just our decision to go out there and play a game. Everyone is notified, right? Major League Baseball is notified. The Phillies are notified. The Marlins are notified. And we went out and played the game. We followed the rules and regulations that are in place. It’s not like any organization independently decided to go out and play.”
By July 27, the Marlins had 13 members of their traveling party test positive. MLB postponed Miami’s home opener against the Orioles.
By July 28, the number of positive tests hit 17. The Marlins’ season is now on hold through the weekend so that the team could have “time to focus on providing care for their players and planning their Baseball Operations for a resumption early next week,” as MLB explained in a press release.
Three more positive tests surfaced over the next three days before the list plateaued.
“Every night, you’re kind of on pins and needles,” said outfielder Corey Dickerson, a father of two with a third on the way who tested negative throughout. “You can’t sleep. Am I going to get that phone call? ... Of course we’re all concerned.”
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‘It kept changing’
The outbreak forced the Marlins into quarantine and kept them in Philadelphia seven days longer than originally scheduled while they waited for MLB to provide clarity on their future.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said the original plan was for the Marlins to postpone their two games against the Orioles in Miami and then resume their schedule against the Orioles in Baltimore last Wednesday if testing results were “acceptable.”
The continued return of positive tests forced MLB to take additional action, shutting the Marlins down for the entire week and having them stay in the northeast when their season picked back up. That also meant postponing their home series against the Washington Nationals that was supposed to be played last weekend.
The Marlins, who have been on the road since July 21, will play two more road series — Friday through Sunday at the Mets, Aug. 11-12 at the Blue Jays in Buffalo — before returning to Miami.
“It kept changing,” Mattingly said of the team’s schedule. “We were going to go home one day and then next thing you know, we’re going to Baltimore this day. … Everything kind of continued to change. Information was coming kind of slowly. We didn’t know. It kept changing, so there wasn’t really anything to give to guys. They’re just kind of in the rooms, not knowing.”
The mental challenge of not knowing what was coming was matched by the physical challenge of staying ready for when they eventually would return to the field.
Players were confined to their rooms, so they had to get creative to get their workouts in. Some did Zumba classes. Others did pushups and various stretching routines.
Some pitchers, like closer Brandon Kintzler, threw bullpen sessions against a mattress.
Toward the end of their extended stay in Philadelphia, the 13 who continuously tested negative — “The Trece,” as Marlins president of baseball operations Michael Hill referred to them — were able to get a workout in at the University of Pennsylvania.
“A lot of ups and downs,” Kintzler said. “Hopefully, we come out a lot stronger at the end of this.”
MLB learning from Marlins fallout
MLB hopes to come out stronger from all of this, too. The league has already taken a more proactive approach with instances like the Marlins’. The St. Louis Cardinals are now in the midst of their own seven-day season postponement after 13 members of their organization (seven players, six staff members) tested positive.
“I hope people look at what happened to us and they use that as a warning,” Jeter said, “and just see how quickly this is able to spread between a particular group if you’re not following the protocols 100 percent.”
Speaking of protocols, the league is implementing stricter ones. Among the highlights: requiring the use of surgical masks instead of cloth masks while traveling, teams traveling with a compliance officer who ensures team members follow the league’s protocol and encouraging players not to leave hotels in road cities except for games.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, in a Saturday interview with the Associated Press, referred to the league’s protocols as a “series of little things that people need to do” and acknowledged there have been “some problems” over the first two weeks of the season.
“In order to be better,” Manfred said, “it’s another series of little things. I think it’s peer pressure. I think it’s players taking personal responsibility.”
Added Dickerson, the Marlins outfielder: “You don’t have to be any closer than six feet to do those things. That’s something that we for sure need to do better at, giving each other their personal space. I don’t need anybody to come any closer than that to have a conversation. We’re so used to the normal. Doing everything together. Helping each other out. But we have to look out for each other in a different way and give each other space.”
The Marlins’ self-inflicted outbreak, however, impacted more than just Miami. Five other teams had games postponed or rescheduled that can be tied back to the Marlins.
The Phillies have taken the biggest hit of the group. Their season, like the Marlins’, was put on hold all of last week out of “an abundance of caution,” according to MLB, despite all Phillies players testing negative throughout every round of daily testing last week.
“Look, I understand that guys are probably upset because they’ve had to sit out as well,” Jeter said. “But this is an issue that, like I’ve said, we’re not the only team that is dealing with. These are a lot of teams that are dealing with this. A lot of teams have players that have tested positive. You feel horrible. I feel horrible for our guys. Like I said, I’m happy that no players from Philly have tested positive. I think that’s a good thing. But ultimately, whether or not we play — what games are played or canceled — are not up to us.”
Phillies manager Joe Girardi, meanwhile, said he has no ill will toward the Marlins despite his team’s season being temporarily upended.
“I think there’s a sense of guilt sometimes when a player gets it,” Girardi said, “and that’s a tough way to live because there are so many ways to contract this, and a lot of times you don’t know if someone around you has COVID. So I feel for what they’ve kind of been through.”
Roster turnover
While getting the COVID-19 outbreak under control was one of the Marlins’ top priorities last week, Hill had another task at hand.
Re-assembling the Marlins’ roster.
He now had 17 spots to fill (the 18th player who tested positive was part of their taxi squad in Philadelphia) and a balancing act to handle while doing it. Which prospects get the call to the big leagues? How many serviceable players can they get on the open market through waiver claims, trades and free agency? Keeping the bulk of their 40-man roster intact once the players who tested positive returned from the IL had to be taken into consideration as well.
“When you have to put 18 players on the injured list, it’s something that you never really expect you will have to experience,” Hill said. “In our jobs, we always plan for Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D — and that’s normally one player, two players at a time. So, to encounter the numbers that we had to add to place on the Injured List and respond to that has been a challenge for our entire baseball operations department.”
The end result had the Marlins:
▪ Activating outfielders Lewis Brinson and Matt Joyce from the IL.
▪ Adding seven new acquisitions — infielder Logan Forsythe and relief pitchers Justin Shafer, Josh D. Smith, Richard Bleier, James Hoyt, Brian Moran and Mike Morin — to the active roster.
▪ Recalling pitchers Jordan Yamamoto and Jorge Guzman as well as Harrison.
▪ And selecting contracts of infielder Eddy Alvarez, catcher Ryan Lavarnway, and relief pitchers Nick Vincent, Josh A. Smith and Daniel Castano.
“A pretty good roster turnover here,” Mattingly said. “Some of the guys I’ve never met and still at this point have not met — texted with, but not met. There are other guys that we’re comfortable with that we know are coming. They were part of our summer camp and actually our spring also so parts of it are comfortable.”
And even with the abrupt overhaul, the Marlins still believe they’ll be able to field a competitive team and pick up where they were on the field in Philly.
“Yeah, we’ve been hit hard,” Jeter said, “but I think I said this before, you know, before spring training even started. It’s going to be a test on the depth of everyone’s organization because no it’s different than when guys get hurt during the course of the season. You’re going to have to have others step in.”
Regardless of who steps in, the Marlins — players, coaches, front office and other staff members alike — know they need to step up.
They almost put their season in jeopardy before it could begin. They can’t afford for it to happen again.
“We just have to look in the mirror and see how we can be better,” Jeter said. “This is something that is an issue that’s top of mind for not just our organization but every organization out there. Everyone has to be better.”
This story was originally published August 4, 2020 at 7:09 PM.
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