Marlins' COVID-19 outbreak: White Sox trust in MLB protocols might not matter

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The players are being tested. The seats are empty. The stadiums are fortresses.

And still COVID-19 has penetrated Major League Baseball’s 2020 season.

It only took three days for a team, the Miami Marlins, to experience an outbreak and for the season to be declared “in jeopardy” by national voices.

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The Marlins are still in Philadelphia, awaiting more test results after Monday morning saw their number of positive cases leap to 13 — 11 players and two coaches — which forced the postponement of Monday night’s scheduled games between the Marlins and Orioles in Miami and the Phillies and Yankees in Philadelphia.

The White Sox, meanwhile, are in Cleveland, away from the comforts of home for the first time and set to start a three-game series with the Indians as the baseball world awaits what comes next.

For their part, the South Siders have been nothing but confident in the numerous health-and-safety measures the league has taken in an attempt to safely stage a season. That’s even with one of their own, third baseman Yoán Moncada, testing positive upon his arrival to “Summer Camp.” Moncada was one of two White Sox players who tested positive before workouts started.

“Our testing protocol, everything that we've been doing as a ball club, has gone pretty seamlessly well. So it's pretty easy for us to come to the field every other day, do our test, get to work,” starting pitcher Lucas Giolito said last week. “And we're all holding each other accountable as teammates, as far as what we're doing off the field. We have some good stuff set in place so that we're making sure that we're staying safe and we can continue to focus on the task at hand, which is winning ball games.”

Just 29 of the nearly 29,000 samples tested returned positive during “Summer Camp,” per the league’s update on Opening Day, with 13 teams not experiencing any positive tests during the “monitoring testing” phase. But for as relatively encouraging as baseball’s testing numbers might have looked, the Marlins’ situation has shown how rapidly everything can change and how fragile the entire season is.

The Marlins, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal noted, were among the 13 teams that didn’t experience a positive test during the “monitoring testing” phase of “Summer Camp.” They went from zero to more than a dozen in three days.

How quickly everything can change in this environment should be familiar to the White Sox, or at least to Moncada, who showed up for his intake test with no idea he had the virus.

“I never thought I had it before I tested positive,” he said through team interpreter Billy Russo earlier this month. “When I got the results, it was a little scary. I didn’t know how this would affect me, what kind of symptoms I would develop. But thank god, I felt good for the most part. I couldn’t do anything, not any physical activity because I stayed at home. It was scary and a difficult time.”

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No White Sox players who were asked expressed any hesitancy about being around Moncada upon his return, perhaps another show of faith in the league’s protocols, which require an infected player to test negative twice before rejoining the team.

But even in the Moncada situation, everything about the White Sox 2020 season was briefly thrust into question. While he was out for unexplained reasons, speculation spiraled into how the White Sox could meet their lofty expectations without their best player. Once he returned, his status for Opening Day was still a mystery, the supposed need for a hot start placing seeming importance on his inclusion in the lineup from Day 1.

That was one player. Baseball now faces the questions of what happens when a large portion of a team has been infected. Will the Marlins have to continue playing with what is basically a minor league roster? Or will their games — and the games of their scheduled opponents — be postponed or cancelled, as some experts have suggested they should be? A pair of infectious-disease specialists told Rosenthal they’d recommend the Marlins shutting down for two weeks. A season that features some teams playing 60 games and some playing 50-something and one playing 40-something? How would that work?

But while those are the questions that spring to mind, the thing that should remain front of mind for Major League Baseball and everyone participating in this most unusual of seasons is how to keep everyone safe.

That was the No. 1 issue from Day 1, of course, and as the White Sox have said over and over, they trust in the extensive measures that have been put in place. But as one of the infectious-disease experts told Rosenthal, it might not matter.

“In spite of what the Marlins were doing, it didn’t work,” Dr. John Swartzburg, a clinical professor emeritus at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, Division of Infectious Disease, told Rosenthal. “I’m going to assume the Marlins were following the protocols that the owners and the players have agreed upon … and it failed. It failed in less than 72 hours. So that’s why I’m saying it portends a poor prognosis (for the season to be completed).”

We’ll have to wait to hear from members of the White Sox to see if there is any updated level of trust in the protocols after what’s happened with the Marlins. The consensus has long been that there will be enhanced responsibility on the part of the players to make the correct choices about their activity away from the field. Now that the White Sox are on the road for the first time, that responsibility will be tested further.

But as big an impact as the pandemic had on baseball’s first four days of regular-season action — fake crowd noise, virtual fans and cardboard cutouts got plenty of attention — that impact is about to get even greater just a few hours later. Might more players start wearing masks during games? It hasn’t stopped Didi Gregorius from hitting homers with the Phillies, and his teammate, Bryce Harper, donned one on the base paths Sunday. Might players take the bans on high fives and being in close proximity on the field more seriously? Plenty of things supposedly against the health-and-safety rules were visible during the season's opening weekend. Might more players revisit their decisions to play this season?

Baseball’s challenge to complete the season just got steeper.

“I think we're all trying to keep each other in check,” White Sox manager Rick Renteria said earlier this month. “Everybody knows the protocols that have been put in place, we talked about them again today. We're just doing everything we can to try to mitigate anything that might lead us to illness.

“I guess it's just like society, right? We all have to be responsible and accountable to each other, try to do the best we can to not cross any lines. … We're doing our best. We can't be scared. We just have to do right by each other to the best of our abilities so that we can stay out there on the field as long as possible and get this thing in and hopefully have a positive experience, not only for us but for the fans and everybody else who's watching.”


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