Miami Marlins players after a win against the Phillies on July 24.
Photo: Chris Szagola/Associated PressThe coronavirus outbreak within the Miami Marlins continues to rage. The fate of Major League Baseball’s pandemic-shortened season could hinge on whether it stays there.
Another round of testing revealed four more positives on the team, bringing the total number of new cases among players and staff over the past five days to 17. It left around half of the Marlins’ 30-man roster unavailable, effectively putting one of the 30 teams out of commission for the moment. MLB postponed the Marlins’ scheduled game against the Baltimore Orioles on Tuesday, and it remains unclear when, how or with whom the team can return to the field.
Baseball’s protocols require each organization to maintain an “alternate training site,” where it can store up to 30 additional players to use in these situations. Whether anybody will want to play against them is another story: In a team vote, a majority of the Washington Nationals’ players, who are slated to play a road series against the Marlins starting Friday, said they didn’t want to travel to Miami for those games, a person familiar with the matter said.
The Marlins are currently sequestered in Philadelphia, where they played last weekend, and are scheduled to play the first of two games in Baltimore against the Orioles on Wednesday. The decision about what happens next ultimately rests with MLB. MLB’s 2020 operations manual says the league can relocate teams to other clubs’ home ballparks as needed.
Whenever the Marlins manage to play again, they will likely need to call up a dozen or more players from their facility in Jupiter, Fla. That raises questions about whether they could put together a representative squad: Should baseball, both from an ethical and competitive standpoint, allow an entire new group of people come in, put on uniforms that say “Miami” and call themselves the Marlins?
In an interview with MLB Network on Monday, commissioner Rob Manfred said, “A team losing a number of players that rendered it completely noncompetitive would be an issue that we would have to address and would have to think about making a change.” Under the terms of an agreement with the players’ union, Manfred reserves the right to suspend or cancel the season if he deems that the spread of infection undermines competitive integrity.
“Whether that was shutting down part of the season or the whole season, that depends on the circumstances,” he said.
While determining how to proceed with the Marlins, baseball officials are cautiously optimistic that they avoided the nightmare scenario: transfer of the virus to teams that spent time around the Marlins, and the teams that those teams went on to encounter. The league thinks it can withstand a spate of positives in one clubhouse. Those positive tests, spread across several teams at once, could bring down the entire experiment.
The Philadelphia Phillies, who played three games against the Marlins last weekend, returned no positive results from players or coaches from their tests on Monday, a person familiar with the matter said. Nonetheless, MLB decided to postpone Philadelphia’s game against the New York Yankees for the second straight day so the Phillies could undergo further testing Tuesday.
Even that might not totally clear the Phillies. Harvard Medical School estimates that around 40% of infected people tested four days after exposure to the virus will test negative, when they have actually contracted it. That’s because the disease has an incubation period that could run anywhere from two to 14 days, and so it may not immediately show up on a test. The Marlins and Phillies last played Sunday afternoon, and positive tests on the Marlins have been trickling in since Friday.
What happens with the Phillies from here on will go a long way toward showing whether baseball can proceed. MLB is hopeful that in baseball—a naturally socially distant sport mostly played outdoors—on-field transmission between players is rare, so that even infected Marlins players didn’t pass on the virus to the Phillies. That would allow baseball to push on in spite of the Marlins’ situation without fear of the virus spreading across all the teams in the East region.
So far, that appears to be the case, but it’s too soon to know for sure.
“We built protocols anticipating that we would have positive tests at some point during the season, that the protocols were built to allow us to play through those positives,” Manfred said. “We believe that the protocols are adequate to keep our players safe.”
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Write to Jared Diamond at jared.diamond@wsj.com
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