Quick pivots in schedule needed in MLB coronavirus season

NEW YORK (AP) — Forget about printing a 2020 baseball schedule. Cyberspace is needed for all the backspaces and deletes.

After Major League Baseball discarded the 162-game schedule due to the pandemic, the revised 60-game slate was intact for just four days due to positive COVID-19 tests among the Miami Marlins.

Because the Philadelphia had just played the Marlins, the Phillies are sidelined, too, through Friday as a precaution pending the incubation period. That left a void in the schedule of the New York Yankees, who were scheduled for four games against the Phillies this week.

Following a phone call Tuesday between baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred and New York team president Randy Levine, the Yankees bused to Baltimore for a two-game series against the Orioles rather than go home to await weekend home games versus Boston.

“The fact that we were able to make this change shows that the commissioner’s protocols work and gives him the flexibility to navigate through these times,” Levine said Wednesday.

Yankees players voted unanimously to allow the changes.

“Their attitude is: `Tell us where and we’ll be there,‘” general manager Brian Cashman said. “And that’s, I think, a very powerful statement by them.”

After Manfred finished his call with Levine, he instructed Chris Marinak, MLB’s executive vice president of strategy, technology and innovation, to try to shoehorn in a Yankees-Orioles series at Camden Yards for Wednesday and Thursday. Baltimore had been slated to play four games against the Marlins this week, two on the road followed by two at home.

New York’s four games against Philadelphia are being rescheduled for next week, the first two at Yankee Stadium.

“We knew from the beginning, before we even started the season, that there was...