Especially the Dodgers. If he starts messing with the big market teams "fuck around and find out."Originally Posted by jacksonianmarch
Especially the Dodgers. If he starts messing with the big market teams "fuck around and find out."
Manfred will do everything he can to finish the season. The MLB can't afford to waste a Yankee year -- all owners benefit when the spotlight and sponsorships feature New York.
The only way he'll call the whole thing off is if key Yankees get sick and it spreads through their team. Sorry, small market clubs are expendable.
The marquee flagship Yankees are just too important right now to the MLB trying to regain public interest. What happened to the Yankees' sign-stealing report that was supposed to be revealed but that NY fought against? Someone made it conveniently disappear...
5GG, I think you are right. Same for the Dodgers and less so for the Cubs. MLB needs a LAD-NYY world series badly this year.
Hal sucks
I think that's a big reason we are getting the expanded playoffs. In a short quirky season, a quick losing streak or injury could hurt the Dodgers or Yankees dramatically. If you can just make sure to get them into the playoffs, you are more likely to have them at the top when the season ends.
@JonHeyman
Marlins tests were all negative again today
@Rotoworld_BB
Cards/Tigers 'highly unlikely' to play on Tuesday
Whew. Finally I disagree with you again (but only slightly). I think MLB is too concerned with having ANY playoffs to be much focused on who actually gets there. Then again, MLB adm is so screwed up, it hardly matters what they think or what nefarious plot they may have concocted.
"Fans have become more entitled than anything. So they're starting to question our motives for the game, or how we approach the game. The ones that do question -- like who are you? Just shut up and watch the game tonight." --Kevin Durant on players' lack of effort in regular season games.
RE: Cardinals
@markasaxon
Also, I can now confirm at least eight positives. Of those, six are players. One source said the number is 13.
@JonHeyman
Jeter defends Marlins players, says they just let their guard down in Atlanta and weren’t running around. A few left the hotel but just for a milk, a coffee and in one case a dinner at a house. They didn’t do a good job of social distancing but they weren’t out carousing, he says
I believe him. If they were in Miami, maybe not. Gotta love the Miami night life
You can get milk and coffee at a hotel though?
I'm not defending them. It was stupid, and they should have been more careful. No doubt about that. If you want to play baseball this season, you have to keep yourself in a bubble as much as you can. If they want to go over somebody's house for dinner, opt out of the season. Marlins aren't a playoff team. You just have to sacrifice for two months and then feel free to go do whatever the hell you want
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/epidemio...-can-be-fixed/
On Monday, I reached out to Dr. Zachary Binney, an epidemiologist at Oxford College of Emory University, to get his thoughts on what’s gone wrong in MLB, and if it’s possible — or even wise — for baseball to continue in 2020.
Zachary Binney: We’ve seen two massive outbreaks on two different teams, the Marlins and the Cardinals, that are not related. The question that MLB is facing right now is whether this is going to keep happening, or is there something you can do to change it?
I got asked this morning, what would you be advising Rob Manfred right now? My answer is that I’d tell him to take a deep breath, look in the mirror, and ask and answer honestly, are things going to change? Is there something we can do to avoid the Marlins and the Cardinals happening over and over and over again? You can’t just say this is only the Marlins, everybody else is being good.
What I think you see MLB trying to say is, the players were not adhering to our protocols. And that’s a very convenient story. This is exactly what you’d expect MLB to say to save its season. If it’s risky player behavior, that’s something you can fix. If it’s the protocols themselves, that’s harder.
I have some very serious questions about MLB’s contact tracing procedures that they conducted contact tracing on the four Marlins who tested positive, and that somehow did not lead them to suspend the entire organization. You’re telling me you didn’t identify a whole heck of a lot more people who would have to sit out after having four positives? I don’t even know if they’re accurately doing the six-foot/15-minute measurement. The NFL is using proximity monitors to help automate that, which I think is actually very interesting, and I applaud them for their innovation on that front. I don’t know what MLB is using.
I was always afraid that you would see MLB’s protocols fail for teams in areas with more virus. I thought there was a higher risk of this happening to the Marlins or the Astros or the Rangers or the Diamondbacks than the Yankees or the Mets or the Red Sox or the Phillies. I think it’s a numbers game. But there’s also an element of luck and randomness here. Somebody has to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the test maybe is done on the wrong day.
In terms of ways that MLB could maybe improve things, I would say if you can do more frequent testing or get the results back faster, that would help because it would cut down the amount of time that people bring the infection in from the community, and then to try to reinforce the importance of limiting indoor time in the clubhouse and of distancing when you’re in the dugout and of wearing masks all the time when you’re not on the field.
One thing I will say is that there’s a lot of focus on high fives, and I get it, but that’s not something I’m that worried about, because that’s very quick passing contact. If I had to guess, I think we have a lot more reason to be worried about guys sitting in the dugout talking with each other, and more to the point, what happens inside in the clubhouse and at team hotels, where guys are spending extended periods of time together. I think that’s where most of the spread is happening.
According to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, the Marlins tried to use contact tracing as an excuse for playing against the Phillies last Sunday. That really disgusted me, because you should’ve taken a step back and said, “We have four cases, we need to think that there’s an outbreak, we should not be playing this game until we have a stronger sense of whether there is one or isn’t.” Contact tracing works best if you have one case and you want to identify people you needed to immediately quarantine. That doesn’t seem to be what the use was with the Marlins. It was [perverse] to be like, if we didn’t identify anyone in contact tracing, they must be fine. And that is really not how you should be thinking about it. It’s a piece of a broader puzzle. That made me pretty angry.
The other thing I’m worried about is that we’re getting reports on the investigation into what happened in Miami and St. Louis, and the team doing the investigating is the same MLB department that’s handling things like sign stealing. That’s not an outbreak investigation. I hope they have some actual epidemiological expertise in the groups that are doing the investigating and that those people are being listened to and that they have a very strong hand in writing up the report and the recommendations for MLB.
If this were the plan that I’d built, I would’ve recognized that it was built on the assumption that the country would look like it did in May or June, and that if things change dramatically, maybe we wouldn’t be able to do it.
If that weren’t an option, I would’ve worked with the players to try to negotiate some kind of bubble. Not in a single spot, and just generally speaking, bubbles are not ideal. It’s easy for me to sit here and be like “Create a bubble.” Well, I’m not the player going away from a family for months at a time. That’s not psychologically or emotionally pleasant. But it may be the only way you can do it safely. So maybe figure out something like smaller bubbles, home bubbles, where you rent out a couple of hotels in each market and that’s where the players and the staff stay, and they go between there, the training facility and the ballpark and don’t have contact with anyone in the community outside of that little network, and then when you travel to another city, you’re going bubble to bubble. And you have really strict regulations with actual punishments in place, negotiated with the union, for anyone who’s caught breaking protocol or leaving the bubble.
What could you do now to salvage it? Maybe pick up the frequency of testing and the turnaround time, but do we as a nation have the capacity for that right now? The answer is an emphatic no. What are you supposed to do now? Hope that this was players and staff engaging in risky behavior and that you can modify that, and that people can take a lesson and this will be a wakeup call.
You know how these young ballplayers are . They do need a nice , cold glass of milk once in a while.
UConn becomes the first FBS school to cancel its football season, following other smaller conferences. Pac-12 players contemplating strike. Dominos beginning to fall. NBA and NHL are the only leagues to have developed serious procedures. I don't see how MLB can complete the season unless major changes are made (i.e., something more than Manfred spouting macho nonsense about not being a quitter.). But pathetic though the RS have been, I really hope I'm wrong.
"Fans have become more entitled than anything. So they're starting to question our motives for the game, or how we approach the game. The ones that do question -- like who are you? Just shut up and watch the game tonight." --Kevin Durant on players' lack of effort in regular season games.
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