M.L.B. Employees Become the Subjects of a Huge Coronavirus Study

“This kind of study would have taken years to organize outside of this setting,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford who is leading the study. “With the help of M.L.B., we’ve managed to do this in a matter of weeks.”

As the coronavirus pandemic spread and sidelined sport after sport, Daniel Eichner, the president of the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory in Salt Lake City, realized that his facility would have few, if any, antidoping responsibilities for quite a while.

So, Eichner said, his laboratory redirected its focus and ordered large quantities of antibody tests that had been used successfully in some Asian countries.

To carry out representative testing, the researchers needed a large group of people who were spread all over the country. Bhattacharya said that he had reached out to an array of corporations, and that M.L.B., which already had a relationship with Eichner, was the quickest to agree. The major leagues, in response to the pandemic, shut down spring training on March 12 and have no specific plans to resume play.

“There’s nothing in it for the teams or M.L.B. on this one,” Eichner said. “This is purely to drive public health policy.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/sports/baseball/major-league-baseball-coronavirus-study.html