Dr. Anthony Fauci Expresses Real Concern About MLB Playing This Season Because Of The Conroavirus

One of America’s top epidemiologists said Monday night he could not predict whether Major League Baseball would be able to play this season because of the ongoing spread around the world of the coronavirus.

“As I’ve said, and I keep saying, it’s going to be the virus that determines what the timetable is,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said during an interview on the Yes Network.

Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the national task force studying the spread of COVID-19 around the U.S. with one of the highest profiles of any physician in the country on the subject.

While the U.S. begins to slowly open during the next few months, major sports like baseball will be behind that curve.

“To be quite frank, it’s impossible to predict given the extraordinary efficiency of transmutability of this virus, I don’t think that we can say with any confidence that in the middle of this summer, say OK July 4, we could start a truncated season exactly the way we’d do it normally,” he told Jack Curry.

“There’s going to be a new normal for a while. And it’s not going to be a few months. It likely will cycle around even into next fall and winter. Hopefully it will go way down.”

As of Monday evening, there had been reported 784,326 cases and 42,094 deaths in the U.S., according to figures provided by Johns Hopkins University of Medicine.

MLB has been studying various ways of playing the season, which has been delayed since Commissioner Rob Manfred cancelled spring training and postponed opening day on March 12.

With stay at home orders and social distancing still in place around the country there’s an inability to play baseball for the immediate future in such big-league cities as New York, Boston, Washington, Baltimore Los Angeles, San Francisco/Oakland, San Diego, Seattle and Detroit.

Plans have been discussed to perhaps play a abbreviated season perhaps without fans in attendance, beginning June 1 in Arizona spring camps, or even in both Florida and Arizona.

Fauci said when the time is right there may even be an ability for people to attend.

“You can limit the amount of people in a stadium and make sure you seat them in a way that they are really quite separated,” he said. “And maybe even wearing the facial covers, masks. I know people look at me and say, ‘What are you crazy?’ But it’s better than no baseball at all.”

The big problem, though, is the availability of adequate and instant testing in the U.S. for a disease that has caused a world-wide pandemic and 169,986 deaths.

The greatest concern is that a premature opening of the society and the staging of large sporting events might cause another spike in people catching the highly contagious disease.

In any event, June 1 seems to be the drop dead date for MLB when payments to big-league and minor league players, plus the guarantee of jobs held in the Commissioner’s office, the league’s website, and 30 teams are all set to expire. Without revenue coming in there may be no more funds to pay stadium workers, either.

Players aren’t usually paid until opening day anyway. And paragraph 11 of the Uniform Players Contract outlined in Appendix A of the Basic Agreement states that that the Commissioner can suspend “the operation of this contract during any national emergency during which Major League Baseball is not played.”

A national emergency was declared in this country on March 13, a day after Manfred cancelled the remainder of spring training.

Thus, decisions based on negotiations with the MLB Players Association have to be made.

“What are some of the possibilities?” Fauci said. “People who know more about baseball structure than I do have said, and I think it’s reasonable, you can have a situation where you get a group of players and you put them in a few cities. You get them tested and make sure they’re not infected, and they don’t infect each other.

“And you have baseball, and it’s tough to say, in a spectator-less environment. You have players playing in an environment where people can watch it on television. I mean, the revenues are not going to be the same as when you have a packed stadium. But I think having them play on television is certainly better than nothing. That’s the point.”