MLB Calls Emergency Meeting After 14+ Players Contract COVID in First 4 Days

Matt Webb Mitovich
·2 min read

Multiple outlets are reporting that Major League Baseball will hold an emergency meeting on Monday to discuss the remainder of the already-truncated 2020 season, after more than a dozen members of just one team tested positive for COVID-19.

The Miami Marlins postponed their July 27 home opener (against the Baltimore Orioles) after 14 players and coaches from the team tested positive for the coronavirus, sources tell ESPN. The Marlins had just wrapped a weekend series in Philadelphia against the Phillies, after playing exhibition games in Atlanta.

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The Phillies and New York Yankees in turn cancelled their July 27 match-up in Philadelphia. ESPN reports that the Yankees had been assured that the visitors’ clubhouse, which the Marlins had just used, had been fumigated multiple times since. Relatedly, Athletic Philadelphia reports that the Phillies are quarantining their entire visiting clubhouse staff; the Yankees had traveled with their own clubhouse staff.

Additionally since the MLB season opened on July 23, Cincinnati Reds infielder Matt Davidson went on the 10-day injured list because he had tested positive for COVID-19.

The MLB season had already launched months late, with the mission to have each team play just 60 (versus the traditional 162) games, in addition to enacting multiple other scheduling and rule modifications for the pandemic-era season.

The NBA is the next major league sport set to return to action, resuming its own rejiggered season in earnest on July 30. Since early July, when mini-camps opened, the basketball league has confined itself to a “bubble” at the the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex, located at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Fla.

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