Manfred to Clark: The Season is in Jeopardy
In case it wasn’t clear from the fact that six different teams, a full 20% of the league, have already faced cancelations due to positive COVID-19 tests on the Marlins, Phillies, and Cardinals, Rob Manfred put it in plain terms today:
BREAKING: MLB commissioner Rob Manfred told MLBPA executive director Tony Clark on Friday that if the sport doesn’t do a better job of managing the coronavirus, it could shut down for the season, sources tell ESPN.
Story at ESPN: https://t.co/o0OL7JzowN
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 31, 2020
While the specifics of his call with Clark haven’t been made public, the broad strokes are known. If positive tests jump, and particularly if there is another Marlins-like outbreak, the season will likely end. Given that the second round of Cardinals’ testing hasn’t come back, that could happen as soon as Monday.
There’s no sugar coating it: everyone has to do better. Public health officials have confronted the league about players ignoring its own protocols. Watch a game, and you’ll see a hodgepodge of masked and unmasked players, plenty of finger-licking, and about as much spitting as you would see in the pre-pandemic world. It’s fair to say that players also haven’t taken social distancing and self-enforced isolation as seriously as many hoped when the plan for the season went ahead. Passan quotes one high-ranking official as saying, “There are some bad decisions being made.” Meanwhile, Bleacher Report’s Scott Miller reported that Marlins players went out and visited the hotel bar while in Atlanta.
At the same time, the league shoulders the blame to essentially the same extent. Establishing a code of on-field conduct without any good faith effort to enforce it isn’t so different from not establishing new protocols at all. Despite a prolonged stoppage that pushed the sport back from Manfred’s preferred July 4 start date, actual in-stadium plans are still evolving, which absolutely can’t happen. Anthony Rizzo and Don Mattingly have both aired concerns about the lack of planning for social distancing during rain delays, which is something the league shouldn’t have been caught unawares by. As it turns out, rain is a constant in baseball.
This season was never going to be a normal one. To play baseball while a pandemic sweeps the country — I won’t say safely, because no plan can guarantee absolute safety — requires new plans and procedures for the strange moment we live in. One week into the season, it appears that the league and the players have both in large part tried to keep as much as possible unchanged.
The league didn’t have contact-tracing, game-cancelation, and enforcement plans completely finalized. Players are high-fiving and spitting on the field, potentially transmitting a disease spread by droplets and close proximity. There are no crowds in the stands — we’re all painfully aware of that — but that’s simply not enough to protect players, and both sides need to do better.
What does that involve? More enforcement of the actual rules, certainly. I wouldn’t be shocked to see mask-wearing spike after Manfred’s call to Clark, and teams and players can both do a better job self-policing the various close-proximity habits that players have. Players need to exercise far more diligence in keeping themselves safe; the 100-page set of guidelines the league and the Players Association agreed on aren’t just for show.
It also involves a better plan for dealing with positive tests. The league’s fumbling around the Marlins’ outbreak and subsequent cancelations isn’t how a multi-billion dollar industry should handle an event that, while surely not what they hoped for, was hardly outside the realm of possibility. The Marlins played the Phillies after four players had already tested positive for COVID. The league can’t allow missteps like that to happen and expect to continue as normal.
At the end of the day, both sides need to do better. Many players are taking this very seriously, but “many” won’t suffice. Players can’t keep ignoring guidelines for on-field conduct and expect to get away with it. They certainly can’t go out on the town together, as some Marlins reportedly did. And the league needs to come to the table with clear enforcement of the rules, do a better job protecting players in its facilities, and move more quickly to prevent cases from spreading within teams and from one team to the next.
Come Monday, we’ll have more clarity on the Cardinals’ situation. We’ll also likely hear more from the MLBPA as well as from the league. For now, however, this much is clear: unless something changes, it’s hard to imagine a full season being played this year. The missteps and laxity so far have simply been too great.
Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @benclemens.
i have a question about the infamous marlins group text that led to the, uh, questionable/terrible decision to play the next game . At any point was miguel rojas (their player rep) or anybody from the marlins in touch with the mlbpa about protocol and steps?
I think it’s fair to say, the choice should never have been theirs to make in the first place.
The league’s/PA’s protocols (don’t forget, this part of the plan was done in a joint manner) have clearly been shown to be weak. Teams should be separating players in space and time for as much as possible. You don’t put everyone on a plane together, regardless of social distancing on board. Players should probably be coming and going to stadiums at different times as well.
Are players making mistakes by going out? Yes. That’s the toughest thing NBA players are doing – self isolation for the rest of the season – but we shouldn’t expect players to be more disciplined than society in general. The key here is that, as with any plan, can everyone adapt and move on?
That’s what’s going to be needed, though, if they want to play baseball. Teams need to be much more strict with isolation, and players will need to cooperate and enforce at their level. It’ll be nearly 5x as hard as the NBA (30 teams, 12 man rosters), but it’s doable. The question is…do they *want* to do it?
Thanks for a good summary of the situation. A less than stellar plan with less than stellar execution leads to (shocker) less than stellar results!
Just cancel only the Marlins season, for breaking the rules. No one will miss them anyway.
Blaming the Marlins is a really terrible take from the current situation.
Not because the Marlins don’t deserve the blame.
Without proper monitoring/punishment scheme in place, a group of young millionaires (who have been under lockdown for several months) are NOT going to stay in their hotel.
Especially the ones who cannot bother to wear masks in front of the camera after the Marlins game is cancelled, and there are plenty of them.
This is neither here nor there, but I looked it up today and found it interesting. Calling the Marlins a team of young millionaires does not reflect their actual salaries. Three Marlins are set to make more than $1 million this year (Villar, Dickerson, Kintzler) after accounting for pro-rating. Another three (Aguilar, Cervelli, Conley) are over $500k, three more in the $400k area, and the rest of the team is making roughly $200k for the year.
It doesn’t invalidate your point or anything. It’s just a very different way of framing it. “Young millionaires” implies people without a care in the world for money, and I’m not saying $200k is a bad wage, but it’s a far cry from set for life.
Re being set for life, wouldn’t it be better to look at lifetime earnings, including signing bonuses etc. instead of just this year’s salary?
Well OP was suggesting a punishment, their season gets cancelled
You are mistaken. You must live in the Northeast. Typical arrogance.
Username with numbers? Check. Irrational and irrelevant ad-hominem from out of nowhere? Check. Just another commenter who has nothing to offer who will be ignored? Check.
“ Watch a game, and you’ll see a hodgepodge of masked and unmasked players, plenty of finger-licking, and about as much spitting as you would see in the pre-pandemic world.”
Has that been the cause of the outbreak?
Possibly? Probably?
I mean technically someone in an extremely infectious state could spit blood directly in your mouth repeatedly and there’s a chance you wouldn’t catch it. Viral transmission is weird like that.
“Cause of” no idea. “Increasing the probability of viral transmission more so than if players/personnel avoided doing it” absolutely.
Hmmm…
A mind with the right bent would remember a lot of owners didn’t want to play anyway.
Having made an “attempt” that gets cut short because of player (mis)behavior is almost as good for them. Maybe they weren’t interested in being really effective?
Respectfully disagree. Owners always wanted to play, but wanted to maximize profits by further player salary reductions. You also make assumption that owners could have implemented controls to prevent infection. Many experts strenuously disagreed with that. Certainly, the US as a whole has zero control over coronavirus spread. Why would MLB owners succeed where state and federal governments have failed?
Some owners (various reports put the number at 6 to 8) did not want a season. I can’t post links because then my comment ends up in moderator limbo, but do a search on “major league owners don’t want season” and you’ll see several different “leaks” to that effect. Maybe that was a bargaining tactic, but given the differing financial situations of the teams and their ownership groups it does seem plausible a few of them believed they were better off (financially) by cancelling the season entirely.
Especially the ones with no hope of post season games.
Some/most owners wanted to play, as long as they could get a near-guarantee of profits. But as Joser points out below, 6-8 wanted no interest in a season as they felt they couldn’t even break even no matter what deal they got.
My own CT is that those owners always wanted the season to fail, and some others are happy either way, especially if a failed season gives them more leverage over negotiations in the next CBA.
Just fire the manager of the marlins.
If a manager thinks his job is on the line, he will keep his players in line.
If no jobs are at stake, nobody cares.
I don’t think Manfred is telling Clark this is anything we should care about, except as a private admission that what is happening now isn’t working. Does Tony Clark have the ability to halt a community transmission of COVID-19? The protocols aren’t perfect, but the main problem is that people are getting sick in the communities where players live.
I wonder how many of the players are so conservative they’re into Q and pizzgate and the various associated conspiracy theories. Luke Scott was a vocal birther not so long ago, there must be a few who refuse to take this seriously at all.
Of course there are. Basebally players as a group are going to run a pretty big range. Any time you feel like you have too much faith in humanity, go look at Aubry Huff’s twitter to take yourself down a peg.
I’d say there’s got to be a few dozen at least spread out across the league between players and staff. There’s also likely a few dozen more that are less hardcore “China Virus/Liberal hoax” and more “meh, it’s not that big a deal I’ll be fine because of my millions of dollars and access to the best medical doctors on the planet”.
CoNSerVAtiVEs aRe sTooPid!
r/selfawarewolves is calling
Conservatives are demonstrably and vocally more likely to engage in behaviors which raise the likelihood of infection and/or transmission, increasing the chances of us losing more if not all of the remaining baseball games we might get to enjoy in this blighted year.
So yes.
I wouldn’t say “Conservatives.”
Conservative Parties in Continental Europe have done a great job of handling the virus.
It’s Trump types, around the world, that are running their countries into the ground.
Such people aren’t conservatives. Trumpers are very, very far from “conservative”.
I’m old enough to remember back when y’all tried this same crap with the tea party, saying George W Bush wasn’t really a conservative. Fool yourself if you want, but don’t expect anyone else to listen.
I wouldn’t call the Tea Party conservatives, either.
Since Gingrich, the GOP has become a party of sadopopulists, voting against their own interests in the hope that it’ll hurt “The Other” even more.
Angela Merkel is what an actual conservative looks like.
You’re old enough to remember, but not wise enough to restrain from engaging in rote speculation about people’s ideology and ascribing stupidity to them because you disagree. Thanks for clarifying the motivations of your bigotry.
What happens if a player(s) test positive right before a playoff game or during the World Series?
I believe it’s now up to eight teams who have had games cancelled due to Covid, including six out of the ten eastern division teams, the Cardinals, and the Brewers.
Wait a bit. It’s not just the number of infected.
And wait until players assimilate what Covid left Eduardo Rodriguez.
Cain just opted out.
More will follow.
To define or expect “safey” as an absolute guarantee that nothing will or can go wrong is both unfeasible and ridiculous regadless of the background of the situation.
There is a *LOT* of real estate between an “absolute guarantee of safety”, which no reasonable person expects, and “making some relatively easy efforts to increase player safety and prevent transmission”, of which there are massive failures from both players and league officials.
Typically I’d call it bogus deflection for the league to be blaming the players — Manfred is in charge and the buck stops with him. But, it’s pretty clear the players, as a whole, are not committed to taking this seriously.
Substitute “Americans” for “players” and you have the entire root cause of the current situation.