In a little over a week of the season, Major League Baseball is apparently already suffering its second team-level outbreak.
We knew that the Cardinals had two positive results from tests conducted on Wednesday, and more results are coming in this morning. The early reports are ugly:
Hear multiple Cardinals personnel tested positive. Don’t have breakdown of players/staff
— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) August 1, 2020
There have been several Cardinals players that have tested positive for Covid-19. Per sources. More than five.
— Craig Mish (@CraigMish) August 1, 2020
More bad news. I’m hearing at least 4 more Cardinals players have tested positive for Covid.
— Trevor Plouffe (@trevorplouffe) August 1, 2020
At a human level, I just hope everyone impact is OK in the long run.
As with all things COVID-19, you can cross your fingers as hard as you like, but the damn thing spreads so easily among humans. Once it is in the door of an MLB clubhouse – something you won’t know until days later – it’s going to spread. Unless, that is, the players and personnel have been treating each other aggressively as though they were infected already (and we can see on TV players are not doing that). So while it’s fine for MLB and the MLBPA and whoever else to remind players to do this or that and be serious and whatever, it was almost certainly already too late for the Cardinals.
What happens now? Yeah, right, like anyone outside MLB can say for sure. If they follow the Marlins model, the team will remain quarantined, where they’ve been since Thursday night. The players will get tested, tested, tested, and the league will attempt to figure out how wide the spread is. All Cardinals games will be postponed for quite a while, and now there are big questions about the Twins and Indians, each of whom shared a field and/or a locker room space with the Cardinals within 24 hours of those Wednesday tests.
We’ll update when news comes down, and we’ll see if MLB is content to just shut down individual teams and plow ahead, or if this is the tipping point for the season.
The timing on this – what Anthony Rizzo said when word first came down about the Cardinals:
Anthony Rizzo knows how fragile the Cubs' good start (5-2, zero positive player tests) is: "We come in today, we do our job. We hope tomorrow when we wake up the Cardinals (have) only two of their guys — and not six to eight — and it doesn’t spread there."https://t.co/wBO6uPbXhb
— Patrick Mooney (@PJ_Mooney) August 1, 2020