CNN’s Thursday night town hall on coronavirus was the television program to watch if you wanted an idea of what a return to live sports might look like. That’s because Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred spent approximately fifteen minutes speaking with moderators Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta about his organization’s plans to start the baseball season. You can see a portion of the interview below.
There wasn’t any real earth-shattering information to come out of the conversation between Manfred, Cooper, and Dr. Gupta, but it was interesting nonetheless to hear the commissioner talk of playing games in front of no fans and the procedures that the league and its teams would take to keep players safe. Some items of note:
- Manfred asserted that players who were uncomfortable with assuming the risk of being in close contact with others would not be forced to return to work.
- In the event a player tests positive for coronavirus, he would be quarantined for two weeks, and then MLB would conduct additional tests on anyone the player may have had contact with.
- Owners could stand to lose $4 billion if a season did not happen, an impact Manfred called “devastating.”
Do the economics outweigh the health risks involved in playing sports during the pandemic? That is a question the major organizations are having to ask themselves and should be a contributing factor in plans to resume competition.