One Yankee Plans To Wear A Mask During Games

When people complain about how hard it is to breathe while wearing a mask, I like to point out that doctors and nurses wear masks for entire 12 hour shifts. Your trip to Costco probably doesn't take that long, so just deal with it for an hour. If you're out of breath after a short period of time, maybe your lungs aren't that strong, and a disease that attacks your respiratory system would be devastating, so a mask would really help.

More and more professional athletes are testing positive for COVID, and one of the biggest issues leading up to the possible return of sports was how athletes would stay safe. Baseball offers social distancing when you're playing in the outfield, but for an infielder trying to make a tag, or the first baseman just keeping a runner close, or a runner in general...those players are all near each other. The biggest issue would be during every at bat, when you have a batter, a catcher, and an umpire all in close proximity.

A few Yankees have tested positive so far, so outfielder Clint Frazier has made the choice to wear a mask during games.

Frazier said

I'm just trying to show that it's easy to do and it's the right thing to do. If it helps a little bit, it's not hard to do, so I'm going to try to do it as much as I can. Hopefully someone sees it and maybe they do it, too ... There's a lot of people that have had this impact them in a way, and there are people in our organization that I'm trying to be respectful towards. I want to make sure that I'm not the reason why it spreads to anybody.

There are about a million things I'll be interested to watch about this baseball season, and this is definitely one of them. Obviously Frazier isn't going to be out there running around in a N95 mask, and more video from YES Network shows that it's more like one of those fabric things that stretches over your head and can be pulled down around the neck. It's probably easier to breathe through one of those, and the fact that it's pretty easy to pull up and down will help too. If he wants to wear it during an at-bat, he can quickly pull it over his mouth and nose. When play stops, he can take a step away from any fielders, take a few breaths, then pull it back up. When he's in the outfield, he can just leave it around his neck.

I can't imagine a lot of players will follow his lead, but if we continue to see more players test positive, the trend may grow.