Tyler Cowen suggests a penalty for positive tests to keep baseball players healthy:
… dock a player 30 percent of his salary if he tests positive. That should limit the degree of nightclubbing and carousing, keeping in mind that the already-infected are probably some of the worst offenders and they have been “taken care of.”
…
If need be, the fines can be redistributed to the players who never test positive, thus keeping total compensation constant.
MarginalRevolution.com
My experience is that people tend to find this type of system yucky*. See anti-price gouging laws during a disaster. Sometimes yucky is the better way to deal with things, however.
Cowen mentions needing union approval, but note that the players could institute this themselves without the league approving, just as they could have implemented PED testing and fines.
*I suppose distasteful is a better word, but yucky strikes me as reflecting the depth of the analysis that goes into the rejection.
We’ve taken “Blame the player” as the default assumption? How do prove player negligence as the cause?
I was just saying today that a good way to ensure players start taking precautions better & more often, is if the league made a rule that any team who gets a game cancelled due to positive tests, will automatically get the L for that game & the opposing team gets credited with a W. Players will NOT want to be the guy who was responsible for an L.
I watch Mets games and am continually horrified by the scenes in their dugout. Hardly any players wear masks, there’s zero social distancing, and the manager and coaches, who do wear masks, don’t wear them well — Rojas has his fingers on his mask literally every time the camera is on him, and the guys calling the bullpen pull their masks down to talk on the phone and then don’t clean the phone as far as I can see.