The New York Yankees won’t play the Philadelphia Phillies Tuesday night at Citizens Bank Park. The game has been postponed for the second consecutive day, this time because by mid-day the Phillies hadn’t received their coronavirus test results, a source said.
On Monday, Major League Baseball canceled the Miami Marlins’ home-opening two-game series against the Baltimore Orioles at Marlins Park, whose parking lot has been used as a staging area for COVID-19 testing in south Florida. Florida now has the second-highest number of cases registered in the U.S., at more than 432,000.
The Phillies are still slated to play another pair of games Wednesday and Thursday against the Yankees at Yankee Stadium, where the two teams played an exhibition game last week.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said the season would continue for the Marlins Wednesday in Baltimore, pending more testing and the results of the tests already done on additional Marlins players.
The Marlins had just finished a series in Philadelphia Sunday. On Monday, the club reported that 12 players and two coaches tested positive for the disease, which has been the cause of more than 4.3 million cases and 148,000 deaths throughout the country. The team has been sequestered in its Philadelphia hotel since then.
Since summer camps opened in early July and the regular season began this past Thursday, the Marlins outbreak has been by far the largest among the 30 Major League teams.
The league has had the players under strict health protocols since training camps restarted in all of the league cities at the beginning of July. But traveling for exhibition games and regular season games just began last week.
Baseball had been suspended since March 12. And until the Marlins outbreak, MLB and their players’ union reported there had been only 84 positive results among players since testing began in June.
How all four games between American League and National League East teams are going to be made up in a schedule that accounts for 60 games slated to be played in 66 days is still to be determined. The regular season ends Sept. 27, and the Yankees are not scheduled to play the Phillies again this season after this week. The same scenario applies to the Marlins and the Orioles.
An expanded round of playoffs involving 16 teams is set to begin after that.
On Monday, nine of the remaining 10 games on the schedule were played. The Chicago White Sox game against the Cleveland Indians at Cleveland’s Progressive Field was rained out with a double-header rescheduled for Tuesday.
Manfred said Monday he had no intention of canceling this season at this point, despite the Miami outbreak.
“We expected we were going to have positives at some point. I remain optimistic that the protocols are strong enough that it will allow us to play even through an outbreak like this, and complete our season,” Manfred said in an interview on MLB Network.
Major players such as Buster Posey, David Price and Nick Markakis had previously opted out of playing this season. And star pitchers Clayton Kershaw, Justin Verlander and Corey Kluber are already out with serious injuries.
