ARLINGTON, Texas—Amid the chaos of the Los Angeles Dodgers celebrating their first title since 1988 on Tuesday night, third baseman Justin Turner made his way to the middle of the festivities. He wasn’t supposed to be there.
Partway through Game 6 of the World Series, the Dodgers learned that Turner had tested positive for the coronavirus, the first Major League Baseball player to do so in nearly two months. Per MLB’s pandemic protocols, the Dodgers immediately removed Turner from the lineup and instructed him to isolate. His teammates finished off the Tampa Bay Rays without him in the dugout.
As the party raged on, Turner defied orders and returned to the field. He hugged his teammates. He kissed his wife. He sat inches away from manager Dave Roberts—without a mask—to take part in a team photo. In an interview with Fox afterward, Roberts said, “I didn’t touch him.”
When told by MLB security that he had to leave, a person familiar with the matter said, Turner refused. He continued to share space not just with other players who had already been in close contact with him throughout the game, but with his teammates’ spouses, children and other family members who had not been.
It was a shocking conclusion to a bizarre scene that saw a long-awaited Dodgers championship overshadowed by the revelation that, not long after the final out, Globe Life Field had become the epicenter of a potential Covid-19 nightmare. And it wasn’t even an accident: Turner risked passing on the virus even while knowing of his positive status.
Turner didn’t respond to a request for comment and the Dodgers didn’t make him available to reporters after the game. He posted on his Twitter account that he was experiencing no symptoms.
MLB officials first learned something was potentially amiss around the second inning, according to a person familiar with the matter. That’s when the results from Monday’s testing returned from the lab in Utah that handles baseball’s program. Turner’s sample had come back inconclusive.
This alone wasn’t unusual. Tests registered inconclusive with some frequency during the season, often because of a contaminated sample. An inconclusive test alone isn’t enough to immediately pull a player from a game.
Around that time, the person said, the Utah lab received a FedEx with the saliva samples submitted Tuesday morning. MLB instructed the scientists there to separate Turner’s test from the batch and run it alone, the person said, in order to receive the result as quickly as possible.
Right around the bottom of the sixth, the lab returned the news to MLB: Tuesday’s test was positive. This time, there was no doubt. MLB learned of this just as the Dodgers were staging the comeback that propelled them to victory. By the time word reached the Dodgers dugout, Turner had already played defense in the top of the seventh.
After the game, on a Zoom call with reporters, Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman attempted to explain how Turner wound up on the field after the game in close proximity to others long after finding out of his positive test. He said that the 35-year-old Turner “wanted to come out and take a picture with the trophy” and that “I don’t think there was anyone that was going to stop him from going out.”
“He’s part of the team,” outfielder Mookie Betts said when asked about Turner’s presence on the field. “Forget all that. He’s part of the team. We’re not excluding him from anything.”
Friedman went on to say that he believed Turner was mindful of wearing a mask and keeping his distance, particularly from those he hadn’t already been in close contact with. He claimed that he personally wore a mask the entire time—even though Friedman and Turner were sitting just a few feet apart without any face coverings during the Dodgers’ team photo. In response to that, Friedman said he hadn’t seen the pictures that show Turner interacting with others without masks.
“If there are people around him without masks, that’s not good optics at all,” he said.
Eventually, the Dodgers returned to their hotel, where they all received another round of coronavirus tests. It remains unknown when they will be allowed to return to Los Angeles. Friedman acknowledged that in the MLB bubble, the Dodgers all had frequent close contact with one other, seeming to suggest that further positive tests in the coming days wouldn’t be surprising. During the summer, MLB dealt with coronavirus outbreaks on the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals where new positives continued to spring up days after the initial positive.
“The fact that we were all in a bubble together means that from a contact tracing standpoint, we’re all in that web,” Friedman said. “Now it’s important that we all test negative however many times or whatever the protocols are to make sure that we don’t go out and potentially spread it to other people.”
As baseball sorts through the rubble of what now seems like an embarrassing conclusion to its pandemic season, it will try to find an answer to one key question: How did Covid-19 break the seal of baseball’s playoff bubble—a structure carefully designed to prevent any possibility of the virus sneaking in the first place? The NBA and NHL completed their seasons under similar circumstances, playing in bubbles for nearly three months, without a single case. MLB was unable to last a month.
All personnel in the secure zone were tested daily, up from every other day during the regular season. They were prohibited from leaving or having any contact with anybody from the outside world, keeping them completely sequestered. As of early Wednesday morning, MLB officials didn’t know what happened that resulted in the bubble being popped. They also didn’t know what they would have done if the Rays had staged a comeback Tuesday and forced a Game 7, now that the Dodgers have perhaps been infected. On a night when little went right, that’s one question they didn’t have to answer.
Write to Jared Diamond at [email protected]
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