SI's Bri Amaranthus and Chris Halicke discuss how MLB clubs will handle players who test positive for COVID-19 during the 2020 season.
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00:00 MLB players will be tested for coronavirus as they begin to show up for
00:04 spring training 2.0 and of course they'll be tested throughout the entire
00:09 season. An interesting aspect of this 60 game shortened season is that the
00:14 healthiest team may end up being the most successful team. Chris, I want to
00:18 know the latest on what teams are going to have to do if they want to announce
00:22 those COVID cases. Are they going to have to get players permission or how does
00:28 that work? Well all of Major League Baseball has a common enemy and that is
00:32 COVID-19. This is going to be an interesting season and every team has to
00:37 prepare for the possibility of not if a case happens but when a positive
00:42 case turns up. And to prepare for that baseball has an extra injured list put
00:48 in place. They have the normal 10-day injured list, what is normally a
00:52 60-day injured list is now going to be a 45-day injured list, and then there is
00:57 going to be a COVID-specific injured list which there is not a specific
01:01 number of days tied to that list. There's a number of protocols that players have
01:04 to have to pass before they can go back active. What is going to be interesting
01:09 though is that when a player is put on the IL is that you know even for us
01:14 reporters we might not know at all but definitely right off the bat that we
01:19 won't know you know if a player is going to the normal 10-day DL or if they're
01:23 going to a COVID, to the COVID explicit DL. And the reason for that is
01:28 obviously you know HIPAA violations teams can't just give out hey this
01:31 player has COVID, that player has COVID. This is going to be at the
01:35 discretion of each player. There might be players that are totally
01:39 okay with telling everybody that they have COVID and there might be players that
01:42 want to keep that under wraps. So it really is going to be a case-by-case
01:45 basis of who we know that has COVID and who we know that doesn't. So this
01:51 is really going to be an interesting season because obviously the focus off
01:54 the field is going to be you know how many players end up getting COVID-19.
01:59 Obviously behind the scenes teams are going to know but in terms of the public
02:02 knowing that it's going to be you know one thing or the other and the last
02:05 thing we want to do is you know violate HIPAA and you know possibly you know get
02:11 it you know into any kind of legal trouble that way. So this is really gonna
02:15 be an interesting season watch how teams handle it and there's all kinds of
02:19 regulations and rules when it comes to moving players on and off the 60-man
02:24 pool. So it's really going to be an interesting season definitely going to
02:27 be wanting to be paying attention to hear it inside the Rangers for everything
02:32 that's going on with the Texas Rangers because there's a lot to watch for not
02:35 just on the field but off the field as well.