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