Game on.
After Thursday’s Yankees-Red Sox game was postponed due to a COVID outbreak on the Yankees, Major League Baseball announced Friday afternoon that Friday’s game would be played in The Bronx.
The decision, made by the commissioner’s office, came after conducting contact tracing involving members of both organizations was done Thursday and Friday.
MLB also announced that Thursday’s game would be made up as part of a split doubleheader on August 17 at Yankee Stadium. The first game will be played at 1:05 p.m. and the originally scheduled game will start at 7:05 p.m.
Additionally, as of Friday afternoon, no new cases had come up around the league, as had been feared, since Aaron Judge was at the All-Star Game in Colorado on Tuesday and Judge is among the three new cases on the Yankees, according to sources, along with Gio Urshela and Kyle Higashioka.
Those are in addition to Jonathan Loaisiga, Nestor Cortes and Wandy Peralta, who were previously placed on the COVID IL.
And unless one of the cases proves to be a false positive, they would all miss multiple games.
It’s especially bad timing for the Yankees, who are slated to have three games against first-place Boston this weekend (after Thursday’s postponement), as well as four more versus the Red Sox at Fenway Park next week in a stretch in which the Yankees need to play well to figure to have any chance of contending for the AL East title.
The Yankees have hit 85-percent vaccination rate among their Tier 1 employees and general manager Brian Cashman noted Thursday that all three confirmed positive cases had been vaccinated, but of the three other cases, “not all, but most,’’ had received the vaccine.
