The Nationals will have to wait to start their season.
To some, Opening Day is seen as a holiday. Grab some beer/soda, peanuts, and a hotdog, sit on your coach or in the stadium seats, and watch your favorite team play America’s pastime. Unfortunately for Washington, for the second straight year, the team has become plagued by COVID. This time around, Opening day scheduled between the Nats and Mets was postponed.
— Washington Nationals (@Nationals) April 1, 2021
On Wednesday, it was announced that one player on the Nationals had tested positive and a few others had contact tested. As a result, Luis Garcia, Sam Clay, Yadiel Hernandez, and Tres Barrera, were all called up to the major league roster. The announcement of the player call ups allowed the fans to have an early idea of who was going to miss time. But then the game was postponed, due to a scare of a COVID outbreak.
To make matters worse, Mike Rizzo who addressed the media earlier today via zoom, announced two more players tested positive earlier today. “Unfortunately, we’ve had two additional confirmed COVID test today,” Rizzo said. “Both are players. Both were already in quarantine due to contact tracing.”
It was already reported that the two team’s won’t use today’s off day to make up for yesterday and Saturday’s game is still up in the air. This is the second straight year Washington has had a positive COVID test on Opening Day, but last time, Juan Soto was the one who missed time.
Rizzo went on to address the importance of his players health and how he isn’t pointing any fingers for the outbreak.
“This is a serious business, it’s about people’s health, and these players, obviously they’re very important to me, and to our organization, but they’re people, and we’ve lost over a half a million people because of this virus. This is nothing to joke about. This is nothing to point fingers over. I believe that we’ve done it the right way all of last year and throughout all of Spring Training and I believe that this was just some isolated incident.”
Washington’s first game won’t be announced until contract tracing is finished, so for now, we wait.