Phillies and team employees join the COVID-19 battle

Many of the MLB clubs have joined in the fight against 2020’s worldwide pandemic. The Phillies players, manager, and club staff are all parts of the effort.

All MLB teams are multi-million-dollar businesses, and most fans know their team is owned by people with far more money than they will ever need. Thus, though few have likely said it out loud, there might be an expectation that MLB teams, as 30 discrete units like the Philadelphia Phillies, and as relatively – or very – wealthy young men, might help out in a national crisis with – well – money.

This is an unpleasant matter in a country founded in part on an objection to taxation without representation, but those who don’t have much money do have such expectations when things are tough. Some pretend they don’t, but losing a job is losing a job.

More from Call to the Pen

• Philadelphia Phillies, ready for a stretch run, bomb St. Louis Cardinals
• Philadelphia Phillies: The 4 players on the franchise’s Mount Rushmore
• Boston Red Sox fans should be upset over Mookie Betts’ comment
• Analyzing the Boston Red Sox trade for Dave Henderson and Spike Owen
• 2023 MLB postseason likely to have a strange look without Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals

And a lot of people have lost their jobs in the COVID-19 pandemic. There are suddenly obvious other needs as well.

Early on in the crisis, the Phillies stepped up in regard to their own employees, as did all the other MLB clubs. Mar. 19 reports indicated the team had donated a million dollars to a fund “making financial assistance available” to about 1000 game-day employees, as well as, presumably, their office staff.

The Phillies offices closed Mar. 16.

This was a nice start, but a million divided by a thousand…. It’s a start, but who knew that Mar. 19th? Starts are good.

The team then announced on Mar. 31 support for Thomas Jefferson University’s COVID-19 Better Together Fund. Jefferson is the home of one of the nation’s earliest medical schools and a hospital system, and this fund will support Jefferson health care workers and students.

Manager Joe Girardi appears in a Facebook video for the charity featuring a link to facilitate donations.

On Apr. 2 Bryce Harper and his wife Kayla donated $500,000 to the effort to aid “those in most immediate need battling the effects of coronavirus” in Las Vegas, where Harper grew up, and in their newly adopted, second hometown, Philadelphia.

Their donation was aimed in part at charities specifically related to food needs, but some of the relief was earmarked for a group helping to “equip doctors and nurses.”

Additionally, Aaron Nola and Neil Walker are among 52 MLB players listed as benefactors of Home Plate Project, a charity founded in 2013 by Adam Wainwright and singer Garth Brooks that is currently focusing on feeding the 20 million American children who depend on school meals, which are obviously unavailable at the moment.

Finally, about a week ago, an estimated 300 Phillies employees were reported to have volunteered to participate in a study being conducted by Stanford, USC, and a sports medicine testing lab to determine antibody development in the public.

They will be part of a group of approximately 10,000 MLB employees from the “central baseball” offices and more than two dozen teams who have volunteered.

This group is considered important by those doing the study because they will represent a widely spread cross-section of the public. The Phillies employees, as displaced workers in the fourth or fifth most infected state (depending on which day you look at the data), should be vital to this effort.