Major League Baseball team employees are the subjects of the first and largest COVID-19 antibody study in the United States, the lead researchers of the study told The Athletic today.



Ten thousand employees of 27 of the league’s 30 clubs have volunteered to take part in what researchers from Stanford, USC and the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory are calling the COVID-19 Sero Prevalence Study, an MLB spokesman confirmed. The antibody test does not look for active COVID-19 infection, but rather the presence of a specific blood protein the human body produces in response to it. It is not the same as the PCR tests used to determine if people are currently infected with the virus.



The study includes not only players, their families, and team staff, but also concessionaires, ushers and other part-time employees of all socioeconomic backgrounds, ages and genders, said Jay Bhattacharya, MD, Ph.D., and professor of medicine at Stanford University, one of...