Amid COVID-19, Dodgers and Rays reached the World Series. Here’s how MLB pulled it off
The 116th World Series was scheduled to start Tuesday night, a thought that was unimaginable to many just a few months ago when Major League Baseball decided to give the 2020 season a go in the middle of a pandemic.
COVID-19 would spread like wildfire, was the general opinion, no matter how often players were tested. Air travel and hotel stays were ripe with the disease, and there’s no way high-paid ballplayers with a built-in sense of invincibility would obey the recommended health protocols.
There were other pitfalls that the naysayers used to buoy their lack of faith in the MLB season running its course, and almost immediately the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals caused the whole thing to fall apart.
Yet, there were the Los Angeles Dodgers and Tampa Bay Rays, champions of the National and American leagues, playing at Globe Life Field — before thousands of fans, no less — for baseball’s ultimate prize.
No MLB player has tested positive in the past 52 days, a streak that dates back to the middle of the regular season when all 30 teams were in action.
Baseball is going to pull this off.
The players should take a bow.
“It’s ultimately a testament to the players for being responsible and making good choices and doing everything we had to do to ensure that the season was able to go on,” Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner said. “I tip my cap to every player who put the uniform on and took that risk of playing and was responsible about it and enabled us to have a season and now participate in the World Series.”
But there’s more to MLB taking a COVID-19 victory lap this week than just the players.
MLB’s requiring testing before teams could begin summer camp, preventing on-field personnel from face-to-face contact with anyone outside of their groups, and the bubble instituted for the playoffs also helped.
There was only a 60-game season, and the playoffs have been streamlined with fewer days off and at neutral sites in warm-weather cities where bad weather wouldn’t be a factor. MLB always wanted to complete the season quickly to avoid facing another wave of the pandemic.
A number of players who tested positive before the season were flagged, including Atlanta Braves MVP candidate Freddie Freeman and Texas Rangers right fielder Joey Gallo. Removing them kept COVID-19 away from the larger pool of players and stopped trouble before it started.
Players were tested every other day during summer camp and the season as part of the monitoring system, and that has continued as the playoff field has been trimmed from 16 squads to eight to four, and now two.
Through Oct. 15, 169,143 samples had been collected since the monitoring system started. Only 91 samples returned positive and only 57 were players.
The Rangers were one of nine teams that did not have a positive result during the season.
All media interaction was done via Zoom videoconferencing, except for on-field TV reporters who have been through the testing protocols as well. Even then, interviews are done with reporters wearing masks and standing at a socially-safe distance while a player talks into a microphone.
Some players wore masks in the interview sessions despite being socially distanced. Some also wore masks on the field even though they weren’t required to do so. They were required to wear them just about everywhere else, including in the dugout, on the team bus and on the team charter flights.
Teams took the precautions seriously.
“We committed to do it,” said Atlanta Braves third-base coach Ron Washington, the former Rangers manager. “I’m so happy we were able to make it through the year. It wasn’t so sure that was going to happen.
“When we started this second spring training, they promised everybody in that clubhouse they were going to do the right, they weren’t going to screw it up, and they didn’t. That’s the commitment we made for each other.”
MLB followed the lead of the NBA, WNBA and NHL in establishing bubbles for the postseason. The Dodgers have been holed up in an area resort for more than two weeks and played Tuesday for the 11th time this postseason at Globe Life Field.
MLB permitted families to join the teams after also clearing COVID tests.
The latest the Dodgers and Rays can leave the bubble is late on Oct. 28, if all seven games are needed for the first neutral-field Fall Classic. Whichever team wins will have its victory celebration.
Baseball can go ahead and take its victory lap for making it this far, in the face of so many doubts before a game was even played.
“I was throwing sim games in May and June in Dallas thinking about, ‘Man, are we even going to have a season,’” said Dodgers Game 1 starter Clayton Kershaw, who went to Highland Park High School.
“To be able to be here now and be four wins away from getting to win a World Series is a testament to a lot of people to be able to make this season happen,” he said. “It’s a testament to the players and even Major League Baseball to be able to get to this point.”
This story was originally published October 20, 2020 at 6:15 PM.
