Don’t overcomplicate the matter. What we know — and most importantly what Justin Turner knew by the end of the 116th World Series — is that he had a highly contagious, lethal virus.
If he had the regular flu, heck, if he had a common cold and was knowingly out there, that would be wrong. To be out there with COVID-19 and, according to eyewitnesses, defying MLB security’s requests that he leave the post-game on-field celebration defines reckless.
MLB and the Players Association had agreed upon guidelines for how to play amid a pandemic and one of the protocols called for immediate isolation of any personnel who tested positive for COVID-19. There were no addenda for “except if you win a title” or “ignore if you are the emotional leader of the team.”
The entire bundle that is Major League Baseball — league officials, players, the union, etc. — were so close to getting out of Dodge. Through the weekend, they were at 57 straight days without a positive test. But I cautioned in a column earlier this week that league officials still dreaded the daily emails from their Utah lab, recognizing what even one positive at this late date would do to their showcase event.
It turns out the positive result came late, clouding the triumph of the Dodgers and the sport, made all the worse by Turner — taken out after the seventh inning upon learning of his positive result — returning to the field.
The chain of events, sources say, was that MLB was notified in the second inning of Tuesday’s Game 6 that Turner’s test result from a sample taken Monday had come back inconclusive. MLB could have demanded the game be halted at that point. But the league had received plenty of inconclusives during testing that proved to be negative because of, among other things, contamination. They also had the eight-plus-week run of no positives and the Dodgers had been in a bubble in Texas for three weeks in which they were only allowed to be around each other and only permitted to be at the hotel or the ballpark. Plus the league knew what most around the sport did, that the Dodgers were roundly recognized as one of the teams that had taken virus protocols (the league’s and their own) most seriously and — irony alert — that Turner was one of the leaders demanding adherence.
So MLB told the lab to expedite the spit sample that Turner had given before Tuesday’s game. Two-thirds of the way through what would prove to be the final game of the most torturous season in history, MLB officials received the message that had made them dread opening the emails even through all the successful days: Turner’s Tuesday sample was positive. Word was sent to the Dodgers that Turner needed to be pulled from the game, which he was after the seventh inning.
Again, MLB could have stopped the game. They decided putting Turner in isolation at that point was the best option. You wonder what would have happened if a Game 7 were necessary because during the season, a positive test within a team dynamic led to multiple days off until there was comfort that no one else in the group had the virus.
The Dodgers, the best team in the majors in the regular season and postseason, finished off the Rays 3-1 and a celebration began. Commissioner Rob Manfred on national TV said Turner was in isolation. The Dodgers were ordered to mask up for the on-field, post-game euphoria. Turner sent out a tweet thanking those who reached out, declaring he had no COVID symptoms and adding, “Can’t believe I couldn’t be out there to celebrate with my guys!”
But there he was on the field. Hugging people. Kissing his wife. Eventually sliding mask-less next to the World Series trophy and cancer-surviving manager Dave Roberts to take some photos. MLB security personnel — up to the head of the department — implored Turner to leave the field, according to eyewitnesses. But Turner and several of his teammates, according to the eyewitnesses, stoutly resisted. Security decided they would not forcibly remove Turner over concerns of contact with someone with COVID and recognizing what the optics of a potential tussle with Turner and his teammates could look like on national TV.
Look, I get it. Turner grew up in Southern California, a Dodgers fan. He went from a journeyman to a star the moment he arrived after Sandy Alderson cut him loose from the Mets following the 2013 season. He had become, along with Clayton Kershaw and Kenley Jansen, the Sisyphean symbols of the Dodgers winning the NL West title every year of his tenure and no title. So when the title finally came, the last thing the third-place-hitting spiritual leader of the Dodgers wanted to be was in isolation.
But I am sure, for example, that every valedictorian from every class last spring that didn’t march at graduation due to COVID felt the sting and depression of years-long accomplishment earned, yet celebration missed. And did any of them know they had a deadly virus? Turner did. He needed self-restraint. Exhaustion, confusion, lack of a prepared strategy for such an unpredictable moment, the moment itself; all of it led to terrible optics, at minimum, and let’s hope no worse-case scenarios.
Turner did not make himself available to reporters. The only official who talked in a Zoom press conference was Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman, who reasoned, “I think the people who were around (Turner) were the people that would be in the contact tracing web anyway, which is how closely a lot of us have been around each other.”
Two things: 1) There were plenty of folks on the post-game field who were not part of the Dodgers bubble, such as MLB security, reporters, etc., and 2) even if those in the Dodgers bubble who had been around Turner hadn’t yet contracted the virus, why elevate the chances of that changing in the postgame celebration? If people get sick, how ludicrous is the argument going to be that Turner deserved to take a photo with the championship trophy?
So the Dodgers won that title that had eluded the organization since 1988 on Tuesday night, and on Wednesday were in a holding pattern in Texas, awaiting more test results. This was the season in 2020. Nothing came easy, and at the end, Turner knowingly might have been in the middle of a super-spreader event, which moved one league official to say, “You couldn’t script a horror film any worse.”
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