Over the last two days, 14 players and two coaches from the Miami Marlins have come down with COVID-19, this after playing a three game series in Philadelphia against the Phillies. Now the Marlins first two home games of the year against Baltimore have been cancelled, as well as the postponement of the two games that were slated to be held in Philadelphia between the Phillies and Yankees. So far these are the only two games/series that have been postponed or cancelled because of the virus.
So now this leads to two questions in my mind. Can this be prevented going forward to finish the season? Was there a way to stop the spread in the first place so that this doesn't happen?
Going forward its a little tough to be able to know if they can catch the virus or not. I really feel that baseball went into this season with the idea of, lets just play baseball already and see what happens. Baseball took way to long to try and get this 2020 season figured out and now we have what we have. They were so busy arguing over money and what not, they had no real perfect, or close to perfect, system to be able to keep the players safe and healthy. Or at least as best they possibly can. Currently, it is unknown how the outbreak occurred with the Marlins, who played exhibition games in Atlanta before traveling to Philadelphia. And as of this writing, outside of the Marlins-O's game in Miami and Phillies-Yankees in Philadelphia, the remaining games scheduled for the day were to be played as scheduled. I think it makes no sense really now to try and stop the season at this point, unless, god forbid, something really bad happens to one of the players.
Its too tough to predict how this is going to play out over the final 56 games of the season. But I think it could have been handled better. I said this in a previous article written back in May about how this was being handled and how it was driving fans crazy. The biggest thing was money and it put a huge monkey wrench into the system. If baseball had been smart, and not argued over petty things, they could have not only focused better on player safety, but could have actually gotten more games in I feel. They could have followed the leads of the other sports, basketball and hockey, and put their teams in a bubble. It seemed to have been working so far for both the other sports, at least better then what's going on with Baseball right now. Basketball has had a few positive tests but nothing major, and Hockey's had zero positive tests since camps have started again.
If baseball had been smart, they should have gone ahead with one of their original ideas. One rumor that had been tossed around was have every team play games in their spring training cities and they would have re-aligned the divisions for the season. have everybody play in a Florida and Arizona bubble until the fall classic, then play in a neutral site city to battle for a championship. And they could have had all this set by the beginning of June, so that way they could have started at the beginning of July., That would have made the most sense, but then again this is baseball, they don't always make the most sense.
Now that the season has started, like I said before, unless something, god forbid, really bad happens, they are going to keep playing. They can put players on the IL, fill in with the Taxi squad and keep going.
Maybe that's too simple way of looking at it but that's the way it could happen, and work, if the season is to finish out.
No comments:
Post a Comment