Washington Nationals reportedly dealing with COVID outbreak; tonight’s game vs Philadelphia Phillies postponed...

Talking to reporters after last night’s game about Trea Turner being pulled in the first inning following a positive test for COVID-19, Washington Nationals’ skipper Davey Martinez said it appeared there were no close contacts that would have to quarantine.

“No, there were no close contacts, so that’s good,” Martinez told reporters in a Zoom call after the game. “We’ll figure everything out. We’ll have conversations with MLB moving forward and hopefully we get [Turner] back as soon as we possibly can.”

Asked if he thought everyone on the team would now take rapid tests since Turner did test positive, Martinez said he was about to go find out what was next.

“As soon as I’m done here we’ll meet with the medical staff and see what will transpire next.”

Before the positive result came back, the manager said, Turner showed no signs of being sick.

“No. Nothing. He played the game, started the game as normal ... the first time I heard of it, the protocol is to get him out and get him isolated as soon as possible.”

Asked if anyone else on the team was feeling sick, he said simply, “No.”

In an interview with 106.7 the FAN in D.C.’s The Sports Junkies this morning, Nationals’ GM Mike Rizzo recounted the process of learning about Turner’s positive test, confirming that they didn’t learn about it until the top of the first inning was underway.

“Minutes before we pulled him,” Rizzo said of when they got the news, “... because that’s when the test results came back. He popped positive, and obviously there’s protocols in place where you have to remove him immediately, you put him in isolation and that type of thing, you run the contact tracing to see if there’s anybody else that was exposed. Luckily there weren’t, so that was a good thing. But it was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’

“With the rough July we had with all the injuries on the injury front and all the other things that have happened this month to affect our roster, 48-72 hours before the trade deadline, Trea gets — he pops positive for the COVID. So it was an active evening last night.”

Rizzo too said that the contact tracing found no close contacts.

“There was no one deemed in the [MLB] protocols that fit the prerequisites for exposed for contact tracing,” he said.

Asked how that was possible when Turner was in the clubhouse and dugout and on the field with his coaches and teammates, Rizzo explained the process.

“There’s prerequisites for what is a compromised contact tracing,” he said. “There’s certain parameters that if you were in proximity for X amount of minutes without a mask in an enclosed [space] that’s what this thing is all about, and it’s monitored all the time, so we went through that process and fortunately nobody else was affected.”

Unfortunately those pronouncements may have been premature, because in the lead-up to tonight’s game in Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park, reports came out saying the game was in jeopardy of not being played because the Nationals were dealing with an outbreak of the virus.

And now tonight’s game has apparently been postponed:

Here’s the official word on tonight’s postponement and the news that they will play a straight doubleheader tomorrow starting at 12:05 PM: