We have already seen COVID-19 mini outbreaks at the Major League Baseball team facilities in Florida that affected both the Philadelphia Phillies and the Toronto Blue Jays. The Arizona Diamondbacks had several positive tests, as did the Colorado Rockies, the Seattle Mariners, the San Francisco Giants, the New York Mets, the Los Angeles Angels, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs.
If it looks like I’m just naming every team that exists, that’s pretty much the point. This virus will continue to infiltrate just about every aspect of our society at this rate, and since baseball is actively trying to open up in the middle of it, positive tests are virtually inevitable for every single franchise company.
The Cincinnati Reds are no different, and it was announced today that two Reds players tested positive, according to MLB.com’s Mark Sheldon.
#reds has two players in the organization who have tested positive for COVID-19. Neither tested in Cincinnati nor currently in Cincinnati.
– Mark Sheldon (@m_sheldon) July 2, 2020
As this tweet suggests, the names of the two players have not been released. That said, it will be pretty obvious to anyone who can add 2 to 2 and get 4 which players are affected by this virus, which the Phillies made clear earlier today with a quick look at their transactions. Unannounced IL movements due to “unknown diseases” are inherently nebulous in themselves, but since almost every IL placement has a reason (as Jarrett Seidler highlighted from the baseball prospectus), nothing says pretty much everything.
The first official Reds training is scheduled for tomorrow (Friday). At this point, it will likely become clear which players are affected by this terrible virus. I don’t even say that as if I want to be a PI – just that it will be very easy to look around and see which players are not there at the moment.
Also, it is less an attempt to put together a simple puzzle at this time of the season than an exercise to prepare for it to happen to different players once, twice, five times throughout the process of a regular 60-game season in the middle of a pandemic. This is news itself, yes, but it is also just establishing the protocols in the event that we will inevitably share similar information, as I am convinced at this point in time that this will come up again and again.
Neither is in Cincinnati, as mentioned in Sheldon’s tweet, and I hope they will be quarantined and recover without pain or obstacles. This new normal is just brutal.
