The Miami Marlins celebrate after a win over the Philadelphia Phillies on Sunday.
Photo: james lang/ReutersMajor League Baseball’s return-to-work coronavirus strategy rests on a formula of testing, distancing and contact tracing that leaves little room for error—and plenty of opportunity for it.
It took four days for the holes in all three components of the formula to become obvious.
One issue is that MLB’s playing schedule, its testing schedule, and its protocols for what happens in between are misaligned. A baseball season involves playing games almost every day. Teams can play two or three different opponents a week, usually moving to a new location at least once.
But under the protocols the league has set, they’re tested every other day, and those results can take up to 48 hours to arrive. In the meantime, players are permitted to continue playing and working out.
That creates an obvious problem in guarding against an infectious disease that can only be contained with strict distancing from the infected. A player and his team could have played at least one game—and traveled to another city—in the time between getting tested and getting results. By the time one player on the team is known to be positive, the whole team could have put themselves and probably another team in jeopardy.
That is exactly what happened in the first week of the season. An outbreak of positive tests for Miami Marlins players began on Friday and climaxed on Monday morning—but games were played in between as the extent of the problem came into focus. When it was finally clear, it prompted the cancellation of games between the Marlins and the Baltimore Orioles and the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Yankees.
The situation also left the league with a complicated contact tracing assignment. The Marlins have played in three cities—Miami, Atlanta and Philadelphia—over the past 10 days. It isn’t clear where the Marlins contracted the virus, including what exposure the Atlanta Braves might have.
“They’re asking for trouble, and it would be exactly the kind of trouble they’re getting with the Marlins right now with a protocol like that,” said Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington who specializes in mathematical modeling. “It’s not surprising…What is a little surprising to me is that anyone’s willing to put up with it.”
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred told MLB Network on Monday that he thinks everything will be fine.
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Manfred said: “We built protocols anticipating that we would have positive tests at some point during the season, that the protocols were built in order to allow us to continue to play through those positives, and I think there was support for the notion that we believe that the protocols are adequate to keep our players safe.”
Those protocols do not include a sequestered “bubble” for players and affiliated workers. The bubble concept has been adopted by other sports leagues, including the National Basketball Association, Women’s National Basketball Association and Major League Soccer in Florida and the National Women’s Soccer League in Utah.
In the bubbles, the players are often tested daily, with results coming back within a few hours because samples are often quickly driven to a nearby laboratory for processing. But as they wait for their results, players are cut off from the outside world. That means that they rarely if ever come into contact with anyone who isn’t undergoing the same regular testing regime—and the number of contacts any player has is relatively controlled.
The result so far has been that players who have come into the bubble with infections have generally been identified and quickly isolated. The number of positive tests has then fallen to zero and stayed there.
Baseball spent weeks considering a bubble but the idea fell apart because it wasn’t possible to identify locations that could house large team rosters and staff, for months at a time, and players pushed back against the idea.
Officials publicly consoled themselves with the idea that they would be able to rely on players’ adherence to distancing while working, and their willingness to keep themselves and their families distanced from the non-baseball community the rest of the time.
“If you can do that, you don’t need a bubble because these guys are creating their own bubbles,” said Patrick Houlihan, MLB deputy general counsel, speaking on a virtual panel last week arranged by Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey.
At the time of that event, MLB medical director Gary Green was also confident about the testing plan, which relies on shipping samples to labs in Utah and New Jersey—while raising the issues that are now already dogging the season.
“I kind of view testing as the final exam that tells you if you’ve been doing everything else correctly,” he said. “While testing is certainly an important component, it’s kind of like, once someone tests positive, the cow is already out of the barn, and what frequent testing can do is try and shut that barn door quickly, so that you can control any kind of an outbreak…One of the reasons we’ve had to test so much is that we can’t social distance in sports.”
The challenges in shutting a barn door quickly were on display from the very opening game of opening day, last Thursday.
In that game, the Washington Nationals fielded an entire roster of players whose teammate, star Juan Soto, had learned early that morning of a positive result from a test taken way back on Tuesday.
The rest of the players had played with him Tuesday night against the Orioles, and then worked out with him Wednesday. Those players had their routine testing on Thursday, but played the Yankees that night without knowing the latest results, huddling in the dugout during severe rain until the game was finally halted.
Baseball spent weeks considering a bubble but the idea fell apart because it wasn’t possible to identify locations that could house large team rosters and staff, for months at a time, and players pushed back against the idea.
Photo: james lang/ReutersBaseball officials indicated that they didn’t need to sequester other players who had played and worked out with Soto until they had negative results because under the league’s protocols, none of them had met the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s definition of close contact: within 6 feet for at least 15 minutes.
The thrower of the ceremonial first pitch, Anthony Fauci, gave them a pass. “I spoke to [Nationals owner] Mark Lerner last night and even to the baseball commissioner, and they feel comfortable that the protocols are really adequate to do. I think they probably are,” he told The Wall Street Journal in an interview Friday. “I just can’t pass judgment, because it’s uncharted water. You don’t know what’s going to be adequate.”
Fauci, the Nationals and Yankees got lucky, since the Nats have reported no more positive tests. But that outcome was by no means guaranteed. And nobody knows that better than the Marlins, who were working under the same protocols—and were not lucky.
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—Ben Cohen and Jared Diamond contributed to this article.
Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com
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