MLB 2025 Season

igotid88 said:

https://youtu.be/coSL_bN1gQw

pjhawks said:

Orel Hershiser after Altuve strikes out 'guessing is harder than knowing'. awesome.  

Four days later, baseball is still feeling the ramifications from Sunday’s Marlins game against the Phillies at Citizens Bank Park.

In particular, the timeline of what the teams and league knew, and when they knew it, remains murky. Plenty of questions are still unanswered. Nobody from Major League Baseball or the Marlins has publicly provided detailed answers about the behind-the-scenes decisions or protocols that led the league to determine it was safe to play Sunday. What we do know is this: By the time the Marlins and Phillies took the field for the 1:05 p.m. start, three Miami players had learned they’d tested positive for COVID-19. A fourth had learned of a positive test two days earlier. Miami’s scheduled starting pitcher, José Ureña, was scratched from the game Sunday and put on the injured list the next day without an injury designation.

On Thursday, another positive result raised the Marlins’ total to 17 players and two coaches who’ve tested positive for COVID-19 since Friday, sources told The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal. The Marlins remain in quarantine in a Philadelphia hotel.

People within the Phillies organization have been frustrated this week by the lack of communication from the league, sources said. Phillies general manager Matt Klentak spent nearly 40 minutes Wednesday afternoon addressing the media on a range of issues resulting from the Marlins’ virus outbreak. Yet the picture of why Sunday’s game was played remains incomplete.

Klentak said the Phillies found out about the Marlins’ three positive tests Sunday around noon, about the same time it was publicly reported by media outlets. At the time of first pitch, Klentak said the team “knew some but not all details,” though he did not explain what that entailed. He noted that the decision to play, or not play, is determined by MLB.

“All I can tell you is that there was plenty of communication before that game,” Klentak said. “There were others at the league level who knew about the positive test before we did. So the determination was made at that point that it was safe.

“Obviously, the escalation of that came on Monday with nine more positives. That’s what led to a lot of the scheduling changes that are now taking place.”

When there are positive tests on a team, MLB is responsible for relaying those results to the club. But how open must teams be with each other? Health privacy laws create another layer for teams to navigate.

“There’s obviously a broader safety component to this that affects other players and staff in that clubhouse or in the opposing clubhouse,” Klentak said. “There is a fair bit of communication, not just among teams but with the league centralizing that. The league has taken on a lot of the burden in this to make sure that information is changing hands efficiently and that players and staff are kept as safe as possible.”

However, an epidemiologist working in professional sports – who requested anonymity because he is not authorized by his employer to speak publicly – told The Athletic he is concerned by how baseball has handled the Marlins’ outbreak and the continued issues stemming from Sunday’s game being played at Citizens Bank Park. He cited a seeming lack of communication or miscommunication among teams and said MLB’s protocols raise serious questions about how communication should be handled for similar situations in the future when a team has multiple positive tests.

The epidemiologist said it can’t be left up to players to decide whether to play in a situation like the one the Marlins found themselves in on Sunday.

“There has to be some medical intervention,” he said. “There has to be someone who can say, ‘This is what we have,’ and can say, ‘We need to stop it here.'”

He said if the Phillies don’t turn up any positive tests by Saturday, the probability is low that any would surface after that as a result of last weekend’s games against the Marlins. But a lack of positive tests among Phillies players or coaching staff doesn’t eliminate the problems highlighted by the Marlins fiasco. The sports epidemiologist also questioned whether baseball’s protocols communicate enough urgency about the dangers of multiple positive tests on a team and the corresponding response.

“It’s urgent to try to stay ahead of this,” he said, “because you can’t catch up to it once you fall behind.”

One thing that has been puzzling to the Phillies, and other teams as well, is the apparent inconsistency with which MLB has handled testing issues since the regular season began, compared to the way similar issues were handled before Opening Day. During Aaron Nola’s intake screening process when he reported for summer training camp, for instance, it was determined through contact tracing that he had been exposed to someone who’d tested positive for COVID-19. Nola was required to quarantine for one week and missed multiple workouts, even though he never tested positive.

Yet in the Marlins’ case, MLB seemed, at least from the Phillies’ perspective, to treat the news of three positive tests with less caution than it showed throughout training camp. In addition to the positive test results revealed Sunday, a fourth Marlins player had learned two days earlier of his own positive test. And infectious disease experts were already questioning why MLB didn’t consider this to be an outbreak, considering that Marlins players had spent the past several days in close contact on two flights and in their dugout and clubhouse.

So, it was difficult for Phillies officials to understand, sources say, why Nola was prevented from simply working out, whereas the Marlins were able to play a game. If the same standard had been applied, those officials wondered, how would the Marlins even have had enough non-exposed players to field a team?

Commissioner Rob Manfred addressed this question during an in-studio interview on MLB Network on Monday, saying that contact tracing was done on the four initial Marlins’ positive tests and, as a result, “a small number of players who met the CDC guidelines … were quarantined.” Neither the Marlins nor the league has identified those players.

When asked Wednesday about the contact tracing and what explanation the Phillies were given by MLB for playing Sunday, Klentak deferred the question to the league or a Marlins official.

“I don’t know that I’m in the position to answer that,” he said.

Klentak confirmed Wednesday that no Phillies players or coaches had tested positive since Friday, when the series against the Marlins began, though a member of the Phillies’ visitors clubhouse staff did test positive. Phillies personnel were tested Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Klentak said he expects they will be tested again Thursday and will continue daily testing for the foreseeable future. Because of the typical delay between exposure to the virus and positive tests, Phillies personnel are most concerned about the test results due back between Thursday and Saturday, sources say.

By not stepping in and preventing the Marlins from playing Sunday, MLB now finds itself trying to reactively fix the problem. The Phillies are left in limbo in the process.

The Juggler said:

He's bad but....worst ever? You think Bud Selig would've done better? Dude presided over a cancelled world series...