In a new interview with the Daily Beast, Washington Nationals relief pitcher Sean Doolittle and his wife, Eireann Dolan, expressed skepticism about a plan to open the 2020 Major League Baseball season during the Covid-19 pandemic by sequestering the league’s players, coaches, and essential staff in Arizona.
According to ESPN, MLB’s commissioners office as well as the players’ union have grown “ increasingly focused” on this plan, which could enable teams to start playing games at fields in Arizona as soon as May.
Here’s what Doolittle and Dolan told Robert Silverman about the plan:
“If we’re going to entertain this idea, for the players and the Players’ Association, there has to be that solidarity with those workers who are in those supporting roles,” said Doolittle, a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America. All those laborers would be indefinitely separated from loved ones during a global pandemic, too, their lives reduced to work and little else. And they wouldn’t be compensated for their efforts at the level of a pro athlete. Eireann Dolan, Doolittle’s wife of two-and-a-half years, wasn’t having it. “That’s incredibly dehumanizing and it sort of essentializes a person to their job,” she said.
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