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Jeff passanESPN
Training camps around the Major League Baseball officially open on Friday, marking another step toward the return of the game. As momentous as it sounds, however positive it may seem, Friday is a vital day for MLB for a completely different reason.
The viability of a season, we are about to learn, depends on a series of tests, and not necessarily on the variety that a nasal swab requires. Friday is a litmus test: a public referendum on the results of MLB coronavirus intake tests. Sometime on Friday afternoon, the league is expected to announce the number of positive tests for COVID-19 this week when players and staff return to stadiums across the country. It will surely reach the tens and could reach three digits.
The fork that contaminates every conversation about the virus can train your attention in baseball. Debates over the practicality of a season and the wisdom to return as new daily cases reach record numbers, and whether the reasonably stable death rate tells a different story and goes on and on to infinity. All of this establishes a second litmus test: MLB’s ability, and its desire, to handle a very public experiment in reopening a business while others across the country pause or close.
This is not going to go away. Major League Baseball is played in the United States, and in the United States in 2020, no matter how hard people try, no matter how much safety they practice, they can still test positive for the coronavirus. Which means that not only today, but for the foreseeable future, baseball will have positive COVID-19 players, it will have the accompanying news, and it will move forward with the idea that positive testing is simply the cost of doing business.
Until they are.
That threshold remains undefined and, unsurprisingly, is also part of the debate taking place within sport. A National League official this week wanted to be excited. The players returned. The sounds of summer were beginning to resonate in his stadium. I had waited for this for months. And the feeling was just … empty. If it’s finally going to close, he asked, why do we bother?
Another American League official felt those same pains, and yet he wanted to be optimistic, and not just for the optimist’s sake. He saw what happened earlier this week. The Little League Baseball officially lost its season. Thousands of people lost jobs along with him. The teams were driven into insolvency. Young players will lack meaningful games for almost 18 months. So, yes, he said, the country may seem like a disaster, but it is the duty of the game to try to save itself. The damage when trying, to see if it can really work, pales next to not trying.
A veteran player was crazy as hell. He was about to travel to training camp and glimpsed his teammates and their wives at a club. An Instagram special that narrates itself. “How can this work?” I ask. “Seriously how?” He is far from the only one asking.
Another younger player was excited. He was coming back. I was making the sounds of summer. I had waited for this for months. And the feeling was unmatched. He would socially distance himself. He would stay home instead of going to the clubs. It would adhere to the rules. If baseball falls apart before its 60-game season begins, it wouldn’t be for him. He is committed.
All of these perspectives can exist at the same time without necessarily being wrong. There is optimism, pessimism, frustration, and hope. There are legitimate moral questions about the wisdom of a return and optical questions about its timing. There are fair responses from players choosing to play, and the league and union put together over 100 pages of procedures specifically so they can avoid the myriad possible pitfalls.
Unless the number of positive tests on this week’s entrance exams is out of control, that first trap should be dodged. A reasonable baseline to consider is the NBA. Of the 351 players evaluated in the last 10 days, 25 tested positive. At that rate, baseball would return around 125 positive COVID players among the approximately 1,750 in groups of 60-man players.
If MLB exceeds that by a significant number, let’s say doubling it, that would raise questions. How many players are asymptomatic? How long will they be out? What will you do if one or two people or more need hospitalization? The latter is especially unanswered.
What if they are less positive? No COVID case is a good case, but a lower prevalence than another league would be beneficial. Baseball plans to continue with teams traveling from city to city and to do so without punitive action for failing to meet the suggested guidelines. The NFL is considering fining players for eating out. The NBA will establish an anonymous phone line in its bubble.
MLB is putting immense faith in its testing protocol, a months-long undertaking that involved reviewing a Utah PED testing lab and preparing it to handle more than 14,000 tests per week. Every two days, all players and staff members will send out saliva samples. They will be sent to the SMRTL laboratory in Utah, which will use a grouping method to process the test volume.
To do this, the technicians will take small pieces of saliva from various samples, for example 10 people, combine them and analyze the collective sample. If it turns out negative, those 10 people are safe, and he only took one test. If the result is positive, samples from each of the 10 individuals in the group are analyzed separately to identify who carries the virus.
The evidence, of course, is not perfect, although steps taken to ensure its veracity have allayed fears that were seeping into headquarters. Fears of things like false positives. PGA Tour pro Cameron Champ tested positive and was forced to withdraw from the Travelers Championship last week. His next three tests were negative. He is convinced that the original was a bad test.
The MLB polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test is approximately 99% accurate, which in an individual sport like golf produces a false positive of bad luck. With baseball, math makes the mountains a problem. If the league is doing 14,000 tests a week, that means 1%, or 140, would be recorded as false positives. That’s a lot. Too many. Baseball executives worry that a wave of false positives could affect their team and unnecessary players. The solution: repeating tests of samples that return as positive, which, except for some type of procedural breakdown, takes advantage of this 1 in 100 possibility of a false positive and reduces it drastically.
For there to be any chance for baseball to work, the tests must be nearly impeccable. As difficult as it is, it should be the easiest part because at least MLB controls it. The league does not control local municipalities or state governments or any of the other entities that may create policies that limit meetings or close stadiums or apparently neutralize any chance baseball has of returning.
There is no good roadmap for this. MLB data from the first round of COVID-19 testing is not expected to be particularly granular. It will not be immediately clear if a team arrived at the training camp particularly infected, if a team had, for example, 15 positives. That may come from COVID-19’s injured list, which is not publicly announced, but can be inferred from those who arrived in IL without an announced injury. It’s weird and it doesn’t make much sense and that’s so 2020.
Think of it this way: A sports league is trying to come back amid a pandemic in which case numbers across the country are increasing. On July 3, that’s where the Major League Baseball is. Officially Day 1 on the comeback, preparing for the Washington Nationals to host the New York Yankees on July 23, for Max Scherzer vs. Gerrit Cole.
Baseball is not closing today. You are ready for these positive tests and many more, ready to direct the game backwards. Until it is not.
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