Ninety-two games into Major League Baseball’s 1,800-game regular season, the league is at a crossroads.
All of this was predictable.
And that made all of this preventable.
The league — specifically MLB commissioner Rob Manfred — simply ignored the warnings when it came to proper management of COVID-19.
And when ignoring the issue was no longer possible, they passed the buck.
Now, Major League Baseball’s brass looks like the fools they are.
The Miami Marlins knew they had an outbreak of COVID-19 on Sunday in Philadelphia. They knew they had least four cases on a 30-man roster, but probably many more. They decided — reportedly via group text — to still play the final game of a three-game set.
Now there are 11 players infected, plus two coaches, the Marlins’ two-game series against the Orioles in Miami has been postponed, the Phillies game against the Yankees on Monday had to be postponed as well, and the entirety of Major League Baseball seems to be on edge.
It didn’t have to be this way.
But it was wishful thinking to think something like this was not going to happen given how this league is managed.
(AP Photo/John Raoux) (AP Photo/John Raoux)
While other leagues are playing in bubbles — enforced lockdowns and daily testing — Major League Baseball’s plan was for teams to zig-zag the country to play 60 games in 66 days, all while results for COVID-19 tests took, in some cases, half-a-week to be returned. In some cases, players are being tested again before receiving the results of their prior test from the league’s lab in Utah.
Three days is 4.5 percent of the entire season.
That kind of turnaround effectively makes baseball’s testing security theater given all the variables at play.
And that, paired with an absence of leadership at the top of the pyramid and created a recipe for an outbreak.
If Major League Baseball had a commissioner with gumption and foresight instead of a well-paid stooge for the league’s ghoulish team owners, this could have been prevented. A commissioner worth his salary would have the foresight to install quick-return, on-site testing in all 30 stadiums, in addition to the send-away testing centers in Utah and soon, New Jersey.
And a smart commissioner — one that was looking out for the long-term interests of his business — would have demanded stronger quarantine protocols for COVID-19-positive players on top of that, as to nip a Marlins-like situation in the bud.
And any logical person with the kind of power Manfred has wouldn’t have left the decision to play Sunday’s game up to the Marlins themselves.
Instead, baseball is stuck with the craven Manfred and a problem that if exacerbated or replicated legitimately threatens to shut down the league.
(AP Photo/Chris Szagola)
A conspiracy theorist could say that the Major League Baseball owners didn’t want to play a season after their labor showdown with the players this summer, and so they created a COVID-19 testing protocol that was sure to backfire, thereby forcing the league to shut down.
But Hanlon’s Razor tells us that we should never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I think we know the proper explanation for Major League Baseball. Their stupidity is more than adequate.
For many, this Marlins situation will be a call from knee-jerk reactionaries to shut down all American sports. They’ll claim that it’s unsafe to play sports at this time.
But the NBA, MLS, and NHL bubbles are working. Those leagues had no new cases in their last announced rounds of testing.
(The problem, of course, is that bubbles are not long-term solutions for leagues. They work great now, but if this is the way we’ll have to do sports in the United States moving forward, those leagues might as well fold now.)
But Major League Baseball eschewed a bubble. They instead decided to take the more difficult route, asking teams to travel this season.
That model can work — I really believe that. But all the energy that would have gone into creating one big bubble would now need to be dispersed into 30 smaller bubbles. Traveling requires increased testing and focus.
We know Major League Baseball doesn’t have the former. With the Blue Jays being denied from playing in Canada, the league didn’t even know where all 30 bubbles were until a few days ago.
And given the fact that the league forgot to tell their lab in Utah to show up for work over Independence Day weekend — right as practices were starting across the country — and now allowing this Marlins situation going from a problem to a crisis, it’s clear the league doesn’t have the latter, either.
(Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
The games will go on. These leagues simply cannot afford to wait for a vaccine or federal and state governments to get their acts together. Doing that could mean waiting forever.
The next league up is the NFL. Their situation is challenging, as they will be traveling, too. But it will be easier to manage — they’ll have more frequent testing and less travel, as well as a system for travel which has effectively quarantined players for years. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell might be hated, but he’s competent, and he needs to pay close attention to baseball’s failures.
The lesson is clear: take your eye off the ball for even one moment and the whole enterprise might crash down.
Of course, it’d be great if Major League Baseball could learn from its own mistakes — we’d all like Monday’s situation to be the last of its kind — but given everything we know about Manfred and company, I’m not holding my breath.
