Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Andrew McCutchen came out and stated the same frustrations so many baseball fans across the country have shared over the past week but from a different perspective.Â
Just three games into the season, McCutchen and his teammates saw their first cancellation due to a COVID-19 outbreak on the opposing team and that caused even more postponements to the Phillies’ schedule. The team went eight days before playing its next game without having a single player test positive because its home ballpark was still shutdown after being briefly used by the Miami Marlins, the team with the outbreak, and the MLB had to wait to see if any players tested positive after being exposed to the Marlins players.
It is still unclear exactly how the Marlins were exposed to the virus but it has been confirmed as “a night out in Atlanta,” according to The Athletic. That news did not sit well with McCutchen.
“I was upset at everything that’s transpired through that — whoever decided to step out or not necessarily follow the health and safety protocol,” McCutchen said on The Athletic’s “Starkville” podcast. “That upset me. What made me angry was that we — as the Phillies — we were the ones that ended up having to pay for that.”
The Phillies eventually got back to playing, hitting the field for the first time Monday night at Yankee Stadium, despite being behind the rest of the league while the Marlins have yet to resume play.
On the second weekend of the season, the league saw another similar incident as the St. Louis Cardinals had 13 positive COVID-19 tests between staff and players. While it cannot be proven as the cause of the outbreak, MLB Network’s Jon Heyman reported multiple players on the Cardinals actually went to a casino while on the road.
It was once again a small group of players acting careless, eventually causing an outbreak which forced more games to be postponed. Of course, those actions affected way more than just those individual players but their teammates and two other clubs as series against Milwaukee Brewers and Detroit Tigers were canceled with this weekend’s games against the Chicago Cubs still hanging in the balance.
And it is easy to imagine so many players and coaches on those teams are feeling the exact same way McCutchen did after Miami’s outbreak.
“I’m sitting here at home, watching 28 to 27 to 26 other teams play, and we’re sitting at home — all (testing) negative by the way,” McCutchen said on the podcast. “And we have to watch this happen while we did nothing wrong. So, for me, that was very upsetting.”
The entire season is hanging in the balance at this point without the league having complete control over the players and their whereabouts outside of games. You can have a large portion of the league being responsible and taking the virus seriously but we have already seen it take just a few people letting their guards downs to cause serious ramifications on the season.Â
And for those of us outside MLB, that’s an all too familiar feeling. So many people were forced to be stuck in their homes for months, spring sports seasons were taken away from high school athletes and people sacrificed a lot of time from their lives to do their part in keeping this virus under control, but for what?
Because a portion of the population did not do its part in being responsible and safe during a global pandemic, we are still stuck in it. And in the words of Andrew McCutchen: “That upset me.”
I would love to see the other 28 teams in MLB and the league’s front office to learn from these mistakes and have a much better plan moving forward so we can see the season finish in October rather than August. And if everyone else in the country can learn from this example and start to realize that being responsible is about more than your own personal freedom, we can be in a much better place before too long.
