Yankees: Juan Soto Tests Positive for COVID-19 and Will Miss Opening Night

The Washington Nationals will be without Juan Soto on Thursday night.

Uh oh. Is this going to be a snowball effect that derails Opening Night and games to follow?

With Opening Night set for Thursday when the defending World Champion Washington Nationals host the New York Yankees, we’ve been dealt some bad news.

Nationals star Juan Soto has tested positive for COVID-19 and will miss the matchup, but there’s a larger concern.

All the Nationals players will be tested again shortly after receiving their test results on Thursday. No other Washington player tested positive, which is good news, but Soto has been very much near his teammates as well as players on other squads during the exhibition games.

As a result, this could possibly force Opening Night to be canceled to mitigate the potential spread, considering that would have a much wider negative impact and put the rest of the 2020 MLB season in jeopardy.

Another thing that’s unclear is how fast the turnaround for these tests are. Can the Nats get the results back within the next few hours? If not, will the game be postponed?

The Yankees have dealt with their fair share of this recently, with DJ LeMahieu and Luis Cessa testing positive for COVID-19 at the onset of Summer Camp and Aroldis Chapman getting hit with the same bad news about a week and a half ago.

All in all, we don’t know what will come of this, but, at the very least, the Nationals will be without their best player on Thursday night with Gerrit Cole taking the mound for the Yanks — though that’s the least of anyone’s worries right now.

Fingers crossed. We’re wishing Soto the best, and if tonight’s game is played, we hope the precautions already in place prevent the spread of the virus.