So far, baseball is swinging and missing at its attempt to come back from a month-long delay to its season brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
On Monday morning, General Manager Mike Rizzo announced that the Nats will cancel its team workouts because they have not yet gotten Friday’s coronavirus tests back from Major League Baseball.
Rizzo said in a statement that all of the Nationals’ players and staff were tested for COVID-19 on Friday, per Major League Baseball protocol.
“We cannot have our players and staff work at risk. Therefore, we have cancelled our team workout scheduled for this morning,” Rizzo said. “We will not sacrifice the health and safety of our players, staff and their families.”
Rizzo said it was not safe for the team to continue with Summer Camp “without accurate and timely testing,” and urged MLB to “work quickly to resolve issues with their process and their lab.”
“Otherwise, Summer Camp and the 2020 Season are at risk,” he said.
This comes on the heels of reliever Sean Doolittle’s comments Sunday about how disorganized, rushed and unprepared the league seemed to be in ensuring the safety of players and staff. At the beginning of his Zoom press conference on Sunday, the pitcher looked at his phone to confirm that he had not gotten his results yet.
Initially, the league had ensured teams that players and staff would be getting their results within 24 hours. Three days later, they still haven’t. MLB’s protocols require testing every other day. Doolittle pointed out that tests were taken Sunday without results from previous ones.
MLB is partnering with the Sports Medicine Research & Testing Laboratory in Salt Lake City, Utah, for testing — a lab that until recently, mostly performed anti-doping testing.
The Nationals have so far held three days of workouts at Nats Park with players spread out and often not working out together.
In addition, as part of intake testing done when players first arrived earlier last week, two Nats players tested positive for coronavirus. The team cannot publicly identify the players without their permission, which hasn’t happened yet.
Overall and according to MLB’s most recent numbers, 31 players and eight staff members from 19 teams have tested positive out of 3,185 samples. That works out to be a 1.2% positive rate, which is significantly below D.C’s rate, the national average, and other sports teams vying to return.
Still, more teams have announced in the last 24 hours that they are getting positive test results back which will likely change these statistics.
Matt Blitz