Opt-Outs, Uneasiness Abound During MLB’s First Weekend Back
July 3, 2019 was a pretty typical day for major league baseball. Cody Bellinger hit a walk-off home run in the 10th inning against Arizona to give the Dodgers their league-leading 59th win of the season in their 88th game. Last-place Cincinnati defeated first-place Milwaukee to bring all five NL Central teams within 4.5 games of each other. Stephen Strasburg struck out 14 Marlins without allowing a run. Mike Trout hit two dingers, because of course he did. There were close games and there were clunkers, thrilling displays and frustrating setbacks. You probably forgot about all of it.
This July 3 was, well, different. Temperatures notwithstanding, it might as well have been mid-February, as players from all 30 organizations gathered in their respective ballparks for their first official team workouts in months, after the global COVID-19 pandemic suspended the major league season. Players and staff rejoined their teammates only after first undergoing intake tests for the virus, with several wondering even as they took the field whether they were doing the right thing by attempting to play at all. Those circumstances made for a strange and chaotic first weekend of camp.
Longtime star pitchers David Price and Felix Hernandez announced on Saturday that they would opt out of the 2020 season, one day after veteran catcher Welington Castillo was also reported to have opted out. On Monday morning, Nick Markakis also informed his team he would opt out of the season. Their decisions bring the total number of major league players known to have decided against playing this season to nine.
Castillo’s decision was brought to the press by Nationals manager Davey Martinez on Friday, while Hernandez’s agent announced the six-time All-Star right-hander’s decision on Twitter late Saturday:
Felix hernandez con miedo al COVID-19 ,no jugará en la temporada 2020 , Felix hernandez with fear of Covid -19 does not feel well to play in the 2020 season
— Wilfredo Polidor (@wpolidor19) July 5, 2020
Price, meanwhile, issued a statement on Twitter:
— David Price (@DAVIDprice24) July 4, 2020
Out of this latest round of opt-outs, Price figured to be the best player in 2020, but he was also going to be part of baseball’s deepest collection of starters. The Dodgers acquired Price along with Mookie Betts in a February trade that sent Alex Verdugo and minor leaguers Jeter Downs and Connor Wong to Boston. Before pro-rating, his salary for the 2020 season was set to be $32 million, with the Red Sox and Dodgers each paying him one half of that total. That salary structure is the same in 2021 and 2022, which will be Price’s age-35 and 36 seasons. Whether Price will still be paid for the 2020 season has yet to be reported; remember, only players deemed to be high-risk can opt out while receiving their salaries and service time.
A Cy Young winner, World Series champion, and five-time All-Star, Price was very good in his first season with Boston in 2016, but injuries have sapped him of important chunks of time over his last three. After averaging 218 innings per year from 2010-16, Price averaged just under 120 from 2017-19, making just 63 total starts. When he was on the mound, however, he remained very effective, logging an ERA- of 81 and a FIP- of 89 over the past three years.
He would have slotted in as the third starter behind Clayton Kershaw and Walker Buehler in the Dodgers’ rotation this year, according to The Athletic’s Pedro Moura. In his absence, left-handers Julio Urías and Alex Wood could move up in the rotation and be joined by a veteran such as Ross Stripling or Jimmy Nelson or one of the team’s exciting young hurlers, such as Dustin May or Tony Gonsolin.
Hernandez’s spot on the Braves’ roster was a bit less secure. The 34-year-old signed a minor league deal with the team this offseason, and certainly had a chance to win a job as the team’s fifth starter behind Mike Soroka, Max Fried, Mike Foltynewicz and Cole Hamels. He was competing for that spot, however, with several young pitchers including former first round picks Kyle Wright, Sean Newcomb and Touki Toussaint. Because of expanded rosters, it’s very likely Hernandez would have had some kind of role in Atlanta, it just might not have been a prominent one.
Castillo also would have benefited from expanded rosters opening the door for teams to more easily carry three catchers, as he wouldn’t have bumped Yan Gomes or Kurt Suzuki from their spots on Washington’s depth chart. A 10-year major league veteran, Castillo was a two-win player as recently as 2017 when he was with Baltimore. But he’s coming off the worst season of his career, a -1.0 WAR showing for the White Sox during which he hit .209/.267/.417 for a 78 wRC+.
Markakis, 36, will also fall out of the Braves’ plans for this season. He had re-upped for a sixth season with the team on a one-year, $4 million deal early in the offseason, coming off a campaign that saw him hit .285/.356/.420 for a 102 wRC+ in 116 games. His spot in the starting lineup was going to be greatly assisted by the addition of the DH to the NL for this year, as he might have otherwise struggled for plate appearances alongside Ronald Acuña Jr., Marcell Ozuna and Ender Inciarte in the Braves’ outfield. In his absence, the Braves could still use Adam Duvall as a respectable enough fourth outfielder, or even clear some room for top prospect Cristian Pache to squeeze in some playing time.
While a couple of longtime stars were making their decision to temporarily walk away from the game, others threw the risk of resuming play in the face of the pandemic into specific relief. A total of 31 players and seven staff members tested positive for COVID-19 in the first round of testing the league announced Friday. Among those identified were Braves first baseman Freddie Freeman and relief pitcher Will Smith, Royals catcher Salvador Perez, Twins slugger Miguel Sanó, Yankees second baseman DJ LeMahieu, and Padres outfielder Tommy Pham.
Some of those players were reportedly asymptomatic at the time they were tested, but others weren’t as lucky. Freeman’s wife opened up about his condition over the weekend, saying the virus “hit him like a ton of bricks.”
Please know that this virus is real and if Freddie can get it, anyone else can too. Be careful, wear a mask in public and wash your hands frequently. Thank you all for the messages and prayers… ?? pic.twitter.com/4hhuRCZrSH
— Chelsea Freeman (@chelseafree5) July 4, 2020
Freeman’s story is a sobering one for a league and a country that would like to believe the athletes it wants to place in harm’s way won’t be seriously affected by the virus if they come into contact with it; Markakis cited how Freeman sounded in a conversation they had over the weekend as part of his decision to opt-out. Baseball’s 38 total positive tests were out of 3,185 samples taken, a 1.2% rate. That number was treated somewhat as good news for the league, with ESPN’s Jeff Passan reporting that it was a “far lower percentage than expected around the game.” Part of that expectation is likely due to the positive test rates other sports observed in their first rounds of tests, with the NBA reporting positive results in 5.3% of their tests and MLS reporting a 2.7% positive rate.
As Meredith Wills expressed on Twitter, however, there may be reason to doubt MLB’s report of a 1.2% positive rate. When speaking with reporters on Sunday, Nationals left-hander Sean Doolittle revealed that he still hadn’t gotten results back from a COVID-19 test he’d taken two days prior. He and his teammates also have not received the masks and gloves they were expected to have this weekend. As a result of those difficulties, the Nationals were forced to cancel their workout Monday morning.
Full statement from Nationals GM Mike Rizzo. pic.twitter.com/bwtjvWp025
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) July 6, 2020
Elsewhere, initial tests for Oakland A’s players and staff members were still in transit to MLB’s lab in Salt Lake City on Sunday night. For the Angels, Astros, and one other team, testers who were supposed to evaluate players and staff on Sunday simply did not show up. The snafus make the true positive rate on intake difficult to determine, and it could very well be higher.
It’s important to remember that this is only the beginning. Even if we took the 1.2% positive rate at face value, it comes before teams begin game travel; while MLB’s protocol encourages personal responsibility, it is light on mandates away from the ballpark, even when players are on the road. More players are likely to get the virus, and while many will show mild symptoms or none at all, a few will be like Freeman, and that is going to be a very uncomfortable and dangerous look for the league when it’s more readily apparent that someone’s suffering is a direct result of what MLB is trying to do.
The need to prevent and contain illness is crucial, and it’s a task that MLB has yet to prove it’s able to handle. These setbacks call the entire feasibility of the season into question. Because team personnel are not allowed to enter their facilities without a negative test, delays like this can result in suspended practices, putting some teams at a competitive disadvantage through no fault of their own. More importantly, it severely hinders teams’ ability to catch an asymptomatic carrier of the virus before he has the chance to unknowingly spread it.
The public scrutiny for players who opt out, the stories of players who are already sick, and the logistical difficulties already popping up in MLB’s testing procedures are already understandably taking their toll on players, coaches and staff members. On Friday, Trout still wasn’t fully committed to playing this season, telling reporters, “Honestly, I still don’t feel that comfortable.” Charlie Morton was similarly apprehensive as camps opened, saying, “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do. I don’t know how long we’re supposed to sit in our homes and wait to make a decision about our careers.” Andrew Miller, a representative on the MLBPA’s executive board, was still uncertain on Sunday that there would even be a season.
Andrew Miller: "I think there's still some doubt that we're going to have a season now. By no means is this a slam dunk. We're trying, we're going to give it our best effort, but for me to sit here and say 100 percent would be a lie."
— Anne Rogers (@anne__rogers) July 5, 2020
“You’re always kind of waiting for more bad news,” Doolittle told reporters on Sunday, inadvertently uttering the defining slogan of 2020. This is all going to be incredibly hard, maybe even impossible. Of course some don’t want to play, and for good reason — what are you going to do, accuse David Price of being a bad teammate? But most players seem to genuinely want to. That’s why Doolittle is specific about what needs to improve. That’s why Trout is wearing a mask during baserunning drills. As bleak as all of this is, one of the game’s few bright spots in this moment is that some of its most prominent voices are so eager to point baseball forward, and remind you that its players are regular people with relatable concerns. They want to be in the room when their first child is born. They want to feel safe living with their high-risk partners. They’re willing to do their part to make all of this somehow work. MLB has a long road ahead in holding up its end of the bargain.
Tony is a contributor for FanGraphs. He began writing for Red Reporter in 2016, and has also covered prep sports for the Times West Virginian and college sports for Ohio University's The Post. He can be found on Twitter at @_TonyWolfe_.
Freeman’s condition is terribly sobering. I work as a paramedic and I’ve encountered plenty of patients who were severely sick, ICU-eligible in the back of my ambulance. This is worrisome on a fan and human level. I love Freddie Freeman, and watching him hit is a pure joy. More importantly, however, is that there are thousands in the US who still have near-debilitating symptoms for 70+ days. We don’t yet know the harm that COVID-19 can produce in the long-term, and that, to me, is the most terrifying part. I sincerely hope that no one’s career is hampered because of this.
Thank you for all that you do, and have been doing. You’re all saving us, out there.
I have been hearing about neurological damage (loss of smell, etc). I am not a medical professional, but I doubt we’ve had enough time to see how long it takes for those injuries to recover.
Rudy Gobert (the NBA player whose positive coronavirus test essentially kicked off the cascade of sports leagues shutting down) was saying his sense of smell still isn’t recovered, approaching 4 months later. So yeah, following the rest of the country in rushing back to do unsafe things in the middle of a pandemic whose long-term ramifications we are yet to understand (and demonstrably apply even to professional athletes) is probably not a great idea!
There is a small but significant group of people who remain with symptoms, often debilitating ones, for months. E.g., about 1500 “long-haulers” were identified in a recent study in the Netherlands. Many of them are relatively young, ball player age, and most of them initially did not have severe symptoms.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2020/06/13/report-suggests-some-mildly-symptomatic-covid-19-patients-endure-serious-long-term-effects/#5dd131335979
Exactly. Thank you for providing that study. The Atlantic documented the long-haulers in the United States as well. Just really terrible. The fact that any athlete could contract this and have debilitating, potentially career-ending symptoms for an unknowable amount of time is just terrible. Not sure how much that is getting talked about within MLB.
And just to be clear, this is terrible for anyone it happens to re: long-haul symptoms. I sympathize with athletes however because their career/earnings window is already so narrow.
This is madness. Having a season with nothing guaranteed as far as safety, treatment, prevention, anything; madness.
Madness.
They’re taking precautions and I don’t fault anyone for opting out, but I don’t think it’s mad. The players are going to be spending nearly all their time surrounded by a constantly tested population who have serious financial incentive to be cautious. If they still manage to catch the disease, their chance of even showing symptoms is low. The chance of being hospitalized is lower still, their chance of the death, without co-morbidities is extremely low. Weigh these odds against the money on the table and I think this becomes an extremely reasonable gamble for the vast majority of players.
Having the season will get people killed.
Making some very general assumptions, i calculated that there. is about a 15% chance a player will die, but a 65% chance that some MLB staff member may die.
“Having” any season probably gets people killed- traveling to and from the park… I’m not saying there isn’t an elevated risk in playing- although with enhanced testing, enforced social distancing, the bubble approach, and effective contact tracing the COVID-19 contraction risk might be reduced versus the general population. This is a choice players get to make, and quite frankly its a choice many Americans can’t make- they have to go to work. Commuting to work also carries a risk, if you’re blessed enough to have employment that allows working remotely, good for you. Just remember you’re blessed in that regard, not everyone is, and others have choices to make.
The delays in getting test results back to players and staff are disturbing. If anything, it highlights who is at risk here. Those who are opting out, good for you and yours.
It really forces you to ask, “why are we doing this?”
There’s no reason.
As you said, madness. I love baseball. If we don’t have baseball in 2020, that’d suck. It could also be 100% right.
Money. We’re doing this for money.
It’s a good reason for some people, and a terrible reason for other people, but it’s the reason nonetheless.
Any question that begins with the word “why” can usually be answered with the word “Money”.
Don’t a lot of these players play for the love of the game?
I have been saying “why are we doing this?” For weeks now. I love baseball but at no point did this seem like a good idea.
I really don’t understand the thought behind having one lab read these tests , and at the incredible height of weirdness having that lab be in …Utah?!?
Only some areas of Montana and the Dakotas are further from a major league team than Utah. How are they even doing this at a speed that will matter?
Yeah I wasn’t aware of the logistics of this plan – a single centralized testing location seems incredibly stupid. Unless MLB is also working on unlocking the secrets of teleportation, it seems physically impossible to get these tests conducted and analyzed fast enough to matter. MLB is really playing fast and loose with the health and safety of their most valuable (and really, all of their) employees, which is… not great!
I could be wrong, but I believe this is the lab that MLB uses for drug testing which they’ve now set up to also do COVID-19 testing. On the one hand, that’s good in that they’re not stealing resources from other labs that are doing tests for everybody else (other than reagents etc, which might still be a concern). On the other hand… well, everything you wrote.
No test is perfect and different tests will have different true/false positive/negative rates. So if one team is using a much more sensitive test with a high false positive rate it gives that team a competitive disadvantage, even if it may be safer since any player with a positive test has to sit, even if the test is wrong. That could make this already precarious situation a real shitshow.
That said, there are lots of national labs with multiple sites that they could have picked, or just picked a test that could be run by different independent labs at multiple sites.
The PCR test has a very low false positive rate. The problem is false negatives, not due to the PCR itself, which is very reliable, but because of the difficulty of extracting virus from the back of the nasal cavity. People who have been tested describe the experience as having your brains sucked out through your nose.
I don’t know what test they recieved but I was tested twice and it was a simple swab of each nostril then a swab in the back of your throat. Took under 10 seconds and the worst thing about it was a cough.
The main reason is because Utah has excellent public health infrastructure and lots of labs. This is was the reason I wanted them to do 2020 in Salt Lake. Looks like they’re trying to use the labs anyway?
MLB’s decision to only use its own lab in Utah was predicated on not wanting to use resources that could be used for testing the public at large. Which at the time was a noble sentiment. But certain states that were hit hard early but are now relatively well off, like NY, are doing daily testing at levels far less than their capacity would allow them to do.
I would posit that a more flexible approach to use other labs more local to certain locations would be better. Or maybe they’ll get this ironed out. The problem with the Angels camp was that the testers didn’t show up because it was a holiday. That seems like a pretty simple thing to fix.
To me, a 60-game season is meaningless. Let’s just skip the 2020 season and hope we can play 162 in 2021.
I’m a baseball junkie, but I think playing this season is going end up being a mistake from a health standpoint. Same goes for the NHL, NBA, college football and NFL.
People across the country are STILL not taking this seriously. Maybe a year without the sports you mentioned would wake them up to the reality of this pandemic.
Personally – I think college football will be the one that will have the greatest effect.
I don’t think a 60 game season is meaningless. With that line of thinking, any sports season in any year is meaningless, it’s just a game.
If they play this year and it can be said with certainty that more players got sick than would have had the season been cancelled, I could see myself looking back on the attempt to play this year and cringing. But the fact that players have the option to simply not play if they don’t feel comfortable with the risks involved makes it morally easier for me to root for opening day to go on as planned.
It means a lot of money to a lot of people. The average big league career is less than 6 seasons. These 6 seasons will almost certainly be far and away the prime money making time of these guy’s lives. Try convincing them 60 games is meaningless.
Can players change their minds? Could Price decide next week he wants to play? Could he decide to come back if the Dodgers make the playoffs or World Series?
Could a player watch a team mate or family member get sick in August and decide he doesn’t want to risk it anymore?
Yes they can change their minds but there is a deadline. he could not come back for the playoffs.
I thought they’d get in 30-40 games before they call the whole thing off, and I still think that’s probably true. They’re going to plow ahead with this until it’s really obvious it won’t work.
I admit I am a bit curious whether this number of positive tests was their expectations or not, because it’s going to get worse from here.
At this point, I’m thinking it’s 50-50 they get Opening Day in.
That’s what I was thinking too. The NBA is up to 7 team facilities having been closed and thus their “preseason” leading up to their relaunch. Boston and New York still have 14 quarantine restrictions. Half the Phillies roster is on the COVID IL right now.
Looking more and more unlikely every day. . . . .
However, MLB is one thing. I will be FASCINATED to see the hoops everyone jumps through to justify playing football because I absolutely know that will go ahead no matter what, and probably with fans too.
I think you may be underestimating how stubborn everyone is about this. It’s an escalation of commitment problem.
From a rational perspective, they never even should have started it up, so I’m not sure we’re dealing with people looking at the cold, hard facts.
1.2% was well under what anyone was expecting. The NBA had about a 7% positive testing rate in their intake testing. The overall country’s positivity rate is about 7x what MLB’s was.
The article makes clear that the 1.2% rate is not including a lot of pending tests.
The initial report from Friday was for 3185 samples that had been processed. Today’s statement from MLB was that 3740 samples had been taken for intake testing.
They reported 1.2% on Friday because it’s important to give information out quickly.
Play around with the numerator and denominator any reasonable way that you want. If the additional 555 tests had a 20% positive rate (wildly negative speculation), then the overall positive rate would be around 4%. Which would still be quite manageable compared to NBA/general population.
The testing delays are concerning. One would be hard-pressed to call the overall case counts concerning as well.
There’s no reason to believe that pending tests would affect the rate of positives. Why would tests that had been delayed be anything more than a random sample of all the tests?
I would agree with you that the rate should be consistent…if I trusted MLB to play things straight.
Interesting, I don’t know about the NBA. I would have expected it to be way under the overall positivity rate because nearly everyone who gets tested is either high-risk, has been exposed to someone with COVID-19, or is experiencing symptoms. I am guessing that a random sample of people in the US is going to be way closer to 1% than 7%, if not under it.
The infection rate in the U.S. is thought to be 7-8%. That’s by antibodies, including not only people currently infected, but those recovered.
In no places that have anything resembling wide spread testing is the positive rate anything as low as 1%. In fact, the lowest I can recall is 2.5%, and that was from April. There was a report in April that NYC was roughly 20%. In April.
The national rate is really roughly a guess (given the differing population number and types across the US) but the best estimates have it over 6%.
But the Stanford antibody test, carried out on MLB players, staff, and family members, reported an astonishingly low 0.7%. That wasn’t just the people infected at the time, but people who had been infected at any time.
It’s also misleading because that did not include players who have already tested positive, like Charlie Blackmon.
The players have every right to be hugely concerned. They are putting their health at risk to go to work.
However, I think anyone who expected the testing to go without flaws and perfectly from day one had very high expectations. Some learning curve was to be expected on something that has never been done before, and had to come together in a really, really quick time frame.
I pray for the safety of the players – and the ability to stage the sport – that MLB gets this figured out immediately. I also pray for that acknowledging my own father’s mental health, and the health and well-being of older and more vulnerable populations. My dad is begging for baseball to return so that he has the sport to watch, and talk about with me and with my sons. That’s not to say that his mental health is more important than Kris Bryant’s long-term physical health, but there are indeed a lot of folks who need sports-on-TV right now because they’re becoming so disconnected from the rest of the world that we’re going to start to count their cognitive demise as uncounted COVID-related complications sooner rather than later.
In the end, every single player must decide for themselves which set of consequences they want to accept–they play, and have a higher risk of infection/illness, or they sit, and (in most cases) lose salary and service time. We ought to respect their individual decisions. We are past the point of arguing over the structure of agreement between MLB and the MLBPA. This is the hard part.
Well said. I think most people, here especially, will not begrudge players for opting out. I’m glad opting out is an option for these players and staffers.
It also would not be fair to the players and staffers that do want to play and earn living to cancel the season just because some proportion of them don’t want to participate, and some angry fans/baseball writers don’t want them to.
It’s getting to the point where you could start a half-decent team of players who opted out.
Interesting how so many of them are the veterans, who perhaps can afford it more after making quite a bit of money earlier in their careers.
That was kind of what I thought would happen – a bunch of guys who already have money in the bank may just skip it and that is exactly what is happening. The only exceptions are the Ross brothers. The other guys I think we might see a little bit of it is guys who will be free agents this offseason. Why risk a bad 60 game stretch destroying your market value? (Of course, the flip side to that is you could run into a huge 60 game streak and boost your value)
You also have to wonder how many guys with injuries they could have played through might just go ahead and have surgery now – Jimmy Nelson just pulled the plug on 2020 to have back surgery.
Well Tyson was basically done anyways, and they both gave made a fair amount. Also their dad is a doctor and mom a nurse so there may have been some internal influence there as well.
I said it before, I’ll say it again: MLB is whistling past the graveyard.
Lord knows I’d love to see a “season” (however truncated) but this is just a logistical nightmare. Give it up guys. Everything and everybody (well, we hope) will still be there next year.
As much as I’d like to enjoy even a partial season of MLB, I keep hearing Sean Doolittle’s comment that “sports is kind of a reward in a functioning society”…and we aren’t there
Do the right thing and shut them all down for 2020
While I agree that the MLB should likely shut it down, it is very hard to criticize anyone who wants to play. They all have a very limited window to make as much money, rack up stats etc.
And if we are being realistic with ourselves why do we think it will automatically be better next year? America has shown no desire to follow recommendations and listen to health experts, why are we assuming that is going to change? If you look at charts the assumption is herd immunity would take till July of 2022 last I read. There is always the possibility of a vaccine, but to me judging with success on other Coronavirus vaccines that seems like wishful thinking at best. Now if there is no season players are going to pay for it in free agency (they likely already will) and will see future earnings drop. It’s clearly a bad scenario all the way around, but I don’t get what people expect the players to do.
No one knows what 2021 will bring…but we know 2020 isn’t safe, and health is more valuable than money
Ownership needs to figure out how to sustain players, especially minor leaguers
While I agree, I wouldn’t say that everyone feels the same way.
“health is more valuable than money” is an odd statement since most of us defend our health using money.
I mean, I’m not going to brew up any vaccines in my basement this year.
Who has time to listen to health experts when you’re too busy WINNING
Oddly enough the way this is trending the players might be safer at work. Seems like the spread is now happening during people’s “free time”. I work at a manufacturing facility and at least our site is being very serious/ zero tolerance regarding all CDC guidelines. We have had a few cases and it was employees on furlough or contracted from a family member (so far). I guess you can tell I don’t work for Amazon or a meat processor….
Right. These are professional athletes. If the season were cancelled, most would be training on their own in facilities that don’t have an established protocol, not getting tested every other day.
Shut it the fuck down