South Orange NJ, November 30, 2020 – The final game of the World Series attracted wide attention when Los Angeles Dodgers player Justin Turner, having been removed from the game after testing positive for Coronavirus, returned to the field to join his teammates for a championship celebration. Turner removed his mask for part of the celebration, endangering teammates and their families. Turner also posed for photographs nearby other players and team executives.
A Seton Hall Sports Poll, conducted November 13-16 among 1506 random adults across America, found that 50 percent of respondents placed the most blame for this safety lapse on Turner himself, with 19 percent placing it on the Dodgers, and 7 percent on Major League Baseball. Twenty-four percent had no opinion or did not know. The poll has a margin of error of +/- 3.2 percent.
“There was a lot of finger pointing afterwards,” said Professor Charles Grantham, Director of the Center for Sports Management within the Stillman School of Business, which oversees the Seton Hall Sports Poll. “Ultimately Turner apologized. But this was not only a health and safety issue of the highest order at a time of a pandemic, it was also a major distraction from crowning a World Series champion.”
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ABOUT THE POLL
The Seton Hall Sports Poll, conducted regularly since 2006, is performed by the Sharkey Institute within the Stillman School of Business. This poll was conducted online by YouGov Plc. using a national representative sample weighted according to gender, age, ethnicity, education, income and geography, based on U.S. Census Bureau figures. Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S residents. This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls. The Seton Hall Sports Poll has been chosen for inclusion in iPoll by Cornell’s Roper Center for Public Opinion Research and its findings have been published everywhere from USA Today, ESPN, The New York Times, Washington Post, AP, and Reuters to CNBC, NPR, Yahoo Finance, Fox News and many points in between.
The Results:
During the 7th inning of the final game of the 2020 World Series, the Los Angeles Dodgers removed a player from the field after a positive Coronavirus (COVID-19) test. When the Dodgers won, the same player was seen celebrating with his teammates on the field, without his mask. If the infected player’s maskless celebration were to result in another teammate getting infected with the Coronavirus (COVID- 19), which, if any, of the following parties would deserve the most blame?
- The player himself (50%)
- The player’s team, the Los Angeles Dodgers (19)
- The player’s league, Major League Baseball (7)
- Don’t know/no opinion (24)
| N=1,506
|
General
Population |
Sports
Fan |
Non-Fan | Avid
Fan |
Avg
Fan |
Casual
Fan |
Not a
Fan |
No
Opinion |
| The player himself | 50% | 55% | 40% | 59% | 53% | 56% | 41% | 18% |
| The player’s team, the LA Dodgers | 19% | 22% | 14% | 25% | 25% | 16% | 14% | 5% |
| The player’s league, MLB | 7% | 8% | 7% | 7% | 6% | 10% | 7% | 13% |
| Don’t know/no opinion | 24% | 15% | 39% | 9% | 16% | 18% | 38% | 64% |
ABOUT SETON HALL UNIVERSITY
One of the country’s leading Catholic universities, Seton Hall has been showing the world what great minds can do since 1856. Home to nearly 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students and offering more than 90 rigorous academic programs, Seton Hall’s academic excellence has been singled out for distinction by The Princeton Review, U.S. News & World Report and Bloomberg Businessweek.
Seton Hall embraces students of all religions and prepares them to be exemplary servant leaders and global citizens. In recent years, the University has achieved extraordinary success. Since 2009, it has seen record-breaking undergraduate enrollment growth and an impressive 110-point increase in the average SAT scores of incoming freshmen. In the past decade, Seton Hall students and alumni have received more than 30 Fulbright Scholarships as well as other prestigious academic honors, including Boren Awards, Pickering Fellowships, Udall Scholarships and a Rhodes Scholarship. The University is also proud to be the third most diverse national Catholic university in the nation.
During the past five years, the University has invested more than $165 million in new campus buildings and renovations. And in 2015, Seton Hall launched a School of Medicine as well as a College of Communication and the Arts. The University’s beautiful main campus in suburban South Orange, N.J. is only 14 miles from New York City — offering students a wealth of employment, internship, cultural and entertainment opportunities. Seton Hall’s nationally recognized School of Law is located prominently in downtown Newark. The University’s Interprofessional Health Sciences (IHS) campus in Clifton and Nutley, N.J. opened in the summer of 2018. The IHS campus houses the University’s College of Nursing, School of Health and Medical Sciences and the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine at Seton Hall University.
Media: Media: Marty Appel, AppelPR@gmail.com;
Michael Ricciardelli, Associate Director of Media Relations, Seton Hall
michael.ricciardelli@shu.edu, 908-447-3034