Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred is doing little to protect baseball’s players while … [+] pointing fingers at them and threatening to end the season. One way to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 in baseball would be limiting player movement and banning trades. Photo by Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox/Getty Images
Getty Images
Major League Baseball claims it’s doing whatever it can to protect its players from the coronavirus pandemic, but its actions indicate otherwise.
Traveling from city to city instead of playing in a bubble like the NBA, MLS, NHL and WNBA infinitely increases the amount of risk of contracting and transmitting COVID-19, with an enormous number of possibilities of where players and teams can get sick. That includes, flights, hotels, late night bar parties in suburban Atlanta, for example.
The lack of MLB safeguards have led to 18 Marlins players testing positive, upending the schedules of several eastern division teams and hurting the game, as well as fantasy baseball. At least one St. Louis Cardinals player has tested positive, postponing their weekend series against the Milwaukee Brewers. Cincinnati Reds All-Star Joey Votto was placed on the Injured List on Sunday morning with COVID symptoms, despite no positive test. Chicago Cubs All-Star Kris Bryant remains out with symptoms as well.
Recommended For You
Baseball can try to lessen the already enormous risks its teams and players take on a daily basis by keeping teams’ circles as small as possible. That should include banning trades from team to team while coronavirus is rapidly spreading in several MLB cities like Miami.
Of course teams will immediately test players who are traded from one team to another in the hopes of catching a positive a player may have caught from elsewhere before transmitting it to teammates insulated within their own team circle. But player movement, like the New York Mets’ acquisition of outfielder Billy Hamilton on Sunday morning, in the age of COVID is a luxury rather than a necessity. Not only is taking players away from their families to another city cruel, it’s also potentially dangerous. And trading Major League players for prospects who may not have played a truly competitive regular or postseason game since last August or September is laughable as well.
Major League Baseball should be looking at every way possible to lessen the risk of contracting and spreading COVID-19, but are instead ignoring risks and pointing fingers at one another, with commissioner Rob Manfred vocally and publicly blaming players for not being safe enough. But the league can also help the players out, and limiting or eliminating player movement would be one way to minimize how many people players and teams come into contact with.
Baseball is in disarray right now and the powers that be are doing nothing to stop that. Maybe that can change before the 2020 season is stopped in its tracks.