News & Politics

Sean Doolittle and Eireann Dolan Skeptical About MLB’s Plan to Open Season

The Nationals pitcher and his wife discussed the proposal to start the season amid the pandemic.

The Washington Nationals' Sean Doolittle. Photo by Paul Kim/Washington Nationals.

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. 

Read the full article here.

Senior Writer

Luke Mullins is a senior writer at Washingtonian magazine focusing on the people and institutions that control the city’s levers of power. He has written about the Koch Brothers’ attempt to take over The Cato Institute, David Gregory’s ouster as moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, the collapse of Washington’s Metro system, and the conflict that split apart the founders of Politico.