Speaker 1: It's Wednesday, July. I'm Oscar Ramirez from the Daily Dive
Speaker 1: podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. Baseball
Speaker 1: has been having a rough go as they began their
Speaker 1: sixty games season amid the pandemic. MLB has paused season
Speaker 1: for the Miami Marlins after an outbreak of COVID nineteen
Speaker 1: among players and staff. One big issue for them is
Speaker 1: the misalignment between the playing schedule, testing schedule, and protocols
Speaker 1: for what happens in between. Louise Radnovski, sports reporter at
Speaker 1: the Wall Street Journal, joins us for more. Thanks for
Speaker 1: joining us, Louise, Thank you for having me. I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about baseball in the time of coronavirus. They
Speaker 1: just got their sixty game season under way and it's
Speaker 1: already run into a whole mess of problems. The Miami
Speaker 1: Marlin season was paused by Major League Baseball admit an
Speaker 1: outbreak of COVID nineteen. I think they had fifteen players
Speaker 1: and two staff members have tested positive. I think it's
Speaker 1: been paused at least through Sun Day as of now.
Speaker 1: That could all change, and you know, we'll have to
Speaker 1: see if any more players on the Marlins or any
Speaker 1: other teams that they might have come in contact with
Speaker 1: test positive. But this is kind of exposing a lot
Speaker 1: of holes in their return to work strategy. Louise, you
Speaker 1: wrote a story about how the scheduling is all off
Speaker 1: on everything. They're playing schedule, the testing schedule, and then
Speaker 1: the protocols for what happens in between. Tell us about it.
Speaker 1: I think it's helpful to compare what's happening in baseball
Speaker 1: to something that people have seen in action for a
Speaker 1: number of weeks now, which is the bubble model. Baseball's
Speaker 1: protocols are somewhat the opposite of the bubble. They're playing
Speaker 1: a very long season, shorter than usual, but still very
Speaker 1: long season relative to the one month that folks, for example,
Speaker 1: in the nationalton Sucker League, we're in a bubble in
Speaker 1: Utah playing a long season. They're playing a lot of
Speaker 1: games in that season very close together. They're moving around
Speaker 1: a lot, and they're also testing. They're not testing as
Speaker 1: frequently as folks inside the bubble or testing, which is
Speaker 1: every day in some cases, is using a laboratory that's
Speaker 1: very close by that they can drive the results to
Speaker 1: and get relatively quickly. They are shipping in stead in
Speaker 1: baseball their results to labs in Salt Lake City or
Speaker 1: in New Jersey, and it can take up to forty
Speaker 1: eight hours for results to come back. They're also testing
Speaker 1: every other day. So what you had in the case
Speaker 1: of the Marlins and actually in the case of the
Speaker 1: Washington Nationals on the very opening game of opening Day,
Speaker 1: is a situation in which you can have players going
Speaker 1: out onto the field without knowing what their status is
Speaker 1: at that time, including in the case of the Nationals,
Speaker 1: knowing that one of their teammates had tested PUGS tests
Speaker 1: taking two days earlier, that they just learned the results
Speaker 1: of the morning of Thursday, when Opening Day was due
Speaker 1: to start. And what happens with all of this it
Speaker 1: makes us complicated contact tracing assignment for people, especially just
Speaker 1: going with the Marlins situation. They've played already in three cities, Miami, Atlanta,
Speaker 1: and Philadelphia over the past ten days, and they have
Speaker 1: to go back to see where it all started. What
Speaker 1: you have, even the bubble, is a scenario in which
Speaker 1: if somebody tests positive, you know relatively quickly you can
Speaker 1: isolate them. And what you've seen in the bubble is
Speaker 1: there have been some number of positive tests and the
Speaker 1: number has fallen over time to zero. What you've seen
Speaker 1: in four days of baseball is the exact opposite. You
Speaker 1: learned two days later that somebody tested positive, and by
Speaker 1: that time the team could be an entirely different city
Speaker 1: to the one they were in before, playing an entirely
Speaker 1: different team where the team that they've just played has
Speaker 1: gone on to play another team as well. So that's
Speaker 1: soulmaking for a very troubling scenario. If you believe that
Speaker 1: the field is where transmission is occurring, even if it's not,
Speaker 1: then you've got a scenario where the clubhouses really come
Speaker 1: under particular scrutiny. And neither scenario is good. In some ways,
Speaker 1: this outbreak being confined to one team is the better
Speaker 1: of two scenarios for baseball. You know, in a sixty
Speaker 1: game schedule, how do you catch up? There's already been
Speaker 1: a bunch of postponed games. The teams are gonna have
Speaker 1: to play multiple games in a day possibly, or you know,
Speaker 1: throughout the week or whatever. Can it become too unwieldy
Speaker 1: for MLB to catch up? From an infectious disease standpoint,
Speaker 1: The important part of catching up is how you hold
Speaker 1: things in their tracks to stop the food spreading further.
Speaker 1: So while baseball is wondering things like how do you
Speaker 1: catch up with calendar, I don't call a question of
Speaker 1: how you catch up with the contact tracing and the
Speaker 1: testing schedule going forward. What's clear is what's being improved
Speaker 1: with Marlin's does give the folks who are working on
Speaker 1: the infectious disease side some opportunity to stop assess where
Speaker 1: people are at before they move further, which just makes
Speaker 1: us an even harder target to pin down in terms
Speaker 1: of finding out who's infectious who's not before they have
Speaker 1: a chance to infect many other people. Obviously, the logistics
Speaker 1: are a nightmare when it comes to something like this
Speaker 1: so many games. Obviously the teams might be a little
Speaker 1: bit bigger than a NBA team, But why did they
Speaker 1: choose not to go with some type of bubble situation.
Speaker 1: The size of the roster was a huge part of it.
Speaker 1: They didn't think that they could find the location or
Speaker 1: local is necessary that were big enough to put all
Speaker 1: of those people in a closed system. On top of that,
Speaker 1: they were looking at doing that for months as opposed
Speaker 1: to weeks, which is also a difficult thing to sustain
Speaker 1: for period of time. Even with the cooperation of the
Speaker 1: people in the bubble and what they didn't have with
Speaker 1: that corporation because players didn't want to leave their families
Speaker 1: for months at a time to be sequestered. Has there
Speaker 1: been any reaction from the Marlins from MLB at large
Speaker 1: just saying something more than just these pauses. Well, what
Speaker 1: we've heard from MLB is that they don't think that
Speaker 1: this is a terrible situation. In fact, specifically of the
Speaker 1: phrase used by the commissioner on MLB Network on Monday
Speaker 1: night was that this isn't a nightmare scenario. They think
Speaker 1: the protocols that they have in place are effective and
Speaker 1: that they are doing what they need to do to
Speaker 1: keep players as safe as possible, which is not a
Speaker 1: standard of nobody gets infected. It's a standard of we
Speaker 1: believe we can control or limit outbreaks, not necessarily even
Speaker 1: to one team. There is a scenario they en physition
Speaker 1: which the team uses so many players to infection that
Speaker 1: they become non competitive and that team might have to
Speaker 1: drop out of competition. But they don't see a scenario
Speaker 1: in which right now this is going to lead to
Speaker 1: them shutting down the season, And they don't see that
Speaker 1: the protocols that they presumably continue to intend to use,
Speaker 1: are going to cause that kind of problem later in
Speaker 1: the season. Well, it was always going to be a
Speaker 1: crazy season, so we'll just have to keep monitoring and
Speaker 1: seeing what develops with the pandemic and these players. Luis Radnovski,
Speaker 1: sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal, thank you very
Speaker 1: much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm
Speaker 1: Astar Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't forget
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