(Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
The English Premier League, which has been playing games for more than three weeks now, announced on Monday that there were zero positive coronavirus results out of the 1,973 tests administered in the latest round. Major League Baseball meanwhile, which restarted camps three days ago, can’t even seem to get the tests sent to the right place at the right time.
Such is the predicament the Oakland A’s find themselves in. The club is currently in limbo, unable to hold a full-team workout because their tests remained in San Francisco on Monday night, still waiting to be shipped to the MLB lab in Utah early Monday morning. This after nearly every other MLB team had their results in by last Friday.
MLB’s excuse? According to Alex Coffey of The Athletic, there were logistical issues due to the holiday weekend. This attempted justification has made A’s GM David Forst, among others, livid, according to Coffey. In a WhatsApp message sent to team employees obtained by The Athletic, Forst does not mince words in voicing his frustration with the situation. Here’s a partial transcript, the entire message can be found here:
Thanks again to you all for your understanding on the need to postpone today’s workout for the position players. Unfortunately, that is not the end of this story. MLB has informed me this evening that our test samples from Friday have not arrived at the lab. They were not delivered as intended on Saturday because of the federal holiday and then were not switched to Sunday delivery in time to arrive today. As of this moment, they are sitting at SFO waiting to fly to Salt Lake to be delivered to the lab by 1:30 Mountain Time tomorrow. On top of screwing up the logistics of this whole thing, neither MLB nor CDT (the company that collects the samples) communicated any of this to us until we pressed them for information, at which point all they could do was apologize, which frankly doesn’t really do much for us…
…At this point, the blame lies with CDT and MLB and I won’t cover for them like I did earlier today. Despite having our schedule a week ahead of time, they didn’t alert us to the possibility of any complications around July 4th, and once there were issues, they did nothing to communicate that to us or remedy the situation until Nick (Paparesta, the A’s head athletic trainer) and I forced the issue at various times today. If possible, I’m as frustrated and pissed as you are (well, probably not as pissed as Matt is), and I assure you the rest of the staff is as well.”
The A’s are hoping that the results will be in by this afternoon, which would allow them to hold the workout on Monday evening.