An Open Letter to Justin Turner and M.L.B.

Justin Turner, it’s time for you to apologize.

I lived in Los Angeles long enough to know how much you mean to the Dodgers — especially to L.A. baseball fans who have watched your rise from homegrown journeyman to late-blooming linchpin of a team that just won its first World Series in 32 years.

You’re one of baseball’s brightest stars, but you followed up the greatest win of your life with a dim and dangerous move.

That postgame celebration after the title-clinching Game 6 didn’t just put everyone around you at risk. Being at the center of it while knowing you’d tested positive for the coronavirus bruised a championship team’s legacy and sent a terrible message to fans at a time when the pandemic is raging out of control.

Where is the remorse? What are we missing?

When your coronavirus test came back positive during the late innings of Game 6, you were pulled from the game and isolated. That’s protocol.

Shortly after the Dodgers won, you sent a tweet: “Can’t believe I couldn’t be out there to celebrate with my guys.”

But then, there you were, out on the field to hang with your team, even as you knew you carried a dangerous virus. There you were, not just with your teammates but with a throng of others: with your wife, with the families of other players, with team executives, league officials and the media. You doled out hugs, backslaps and kisses. You sat next to your manager, Dave Roberts, a cancer survivor.

It’s a safe bet that not everyone knew you had the virus.

I’m trying to understand and find empathy.

Everyone gets that you waited for this moment your whole life. That this win must have been particularly special for a Southern California guy who grew up in L.A.’s suburbs and went to college nearby. A guy whose first big baseball memories were watching Kirk Gibson and the Dodgers win the 1988 World Series on his grandmother’s television.

Your back story is one of perseverance. You were cast aside by the Mets at age 28 after a string of unremarkable seasons, then became an All-Star third baseman and the emotional ballast for a World Series winner. All of this is a testament to grit.

That said, it’s not hard to imagine what you were thinking. “Miss this celebration? Screw that!” Maybe the discipline that carried you to that moment failed you at the worst possible time.

Nobody in the general public really knows.

You’d gone through so much to win this title. The long string of wrenching playoff losses. The two defeats in the World Series, including the 2017 loss to the Houston Astros, a team Major League Baseball later found had cheated.

Add in the pandemic with its pressures, tensions and pain.

Perhaps you succumbed to what psychologists call Covid Fatigue, which can lead to poor and sometimes dangerous decision making as we seek ways to taste some semblance of normalcy.

You knew the risks. You had a reputation as an enforcer of health protocols.

“I feel no symptoms at all,” you wrote in your tweet…