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On Monday morning, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported on a number of MLB teams being forced to cancel their workouts for the day due to an unusual delay in their coronavirus testing. On Sunday, the Oakland A’s canceled their workouts on Sunday for the same reason and now it’s the Washington Nationals who have decided to give their teams the day off due to the lack of available information.
The Washington Nationals canceled workouts today as results from their Friday coronavirus tests still have not shown up, sources tell ESPN.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 6, 2020
Comes on the heels of the Oakland A's canceling a workout Sunday because of no results and testers not showing up to Angels camp, either.
According to Dennis Lin of The Athletic, the Padres are also one of the few teams dealing with coronavirus test results not showing up when they are supposed to. However, the Padres have yet to cancel any of their workouts. Aside from reliever Kirby Yates joining the team late, there is still one other Padres player who arrived prior to Yates that has still not received his test results from this past Friday.
Over the weekend, outfielder Tommy Pham, one of the team’s youngest and brightest players, was the first Padre to have tested positive for the virus. He is currently in isolation but has reported to be symptom free.
With so many moving parts, this whole process of resuming the 2020 MLB season was going to have a few hiccups. However, this hiccup specifically is fairly severe in nature and has happened quite early in the grand scheme of things. Some will point to the holiday weekend as a reason things may have been delayed. The MLB has contracted out a laboratory in Utah to handle all of their testing and there certainly could have been a few delays in transit, but when an entire professional sports league is footing the bill to make sure things stay on schedule, this is a tough look all the way around.