Following team workouts on Saturday, New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone announced that two players on the team are positive for coronavirus. Those two players are DJ LeMahieu and Luis Cessa.
LeMahieu is reportedly asymptomatic, while Cessa has mild symptoms. The players gave Boone permission to announce the positive tests. Both players tested positive before returning to New York and are isolating at home.
These are the first two players known to test positive for coronavirus on the Yankees. Just 31 players across the league tested positive during preliminary testing.
Besides those two, not all players have reported to camp yet. That’s because some players are still waiting to receive a negative test to clear them to the facility. That includes guys like Gary Sanchez and Aroldis Chapman.
The announcement of LeMahieu and Cessa testing positive for coronavirus comes on the same afternoon that Masahiro Tanaka was rushed to the hospital after an injury in a simulated game. He was hit on a come-backer off the bat of Giancarlo Stanton. Tanaka is expected to be released on Saturday night as his CT scans came back clean.
Hopefully, these issues will be it for the Yankees in 2020. They’ve gone through an awful string of injuries and bad luck over the past few years, including earlier this year. The baseball gods have been against them, so it would be great if the team could make it through a season without many issues.
But, on the other hand, it’s not unexpected that players are testing positive for coronavirus. That’s just going to happen this year, and players know that. Hopefully, players will see what happened to LeMahieu and Cessa and use that as a warning that anyone can get it and that they need to be careful.