Commissioner Rob Manfred on Thursday night outlined the coronavirus-testing protocols Major League Baseball is proposing, telling CNN that frequent tests will be key to the sport's restart and that a positive test won't mean shutting down the entire team.

Players who do test positive will be quarantined until they have two negative tests over a 24-hour period, Manfred said.

"Our experts are advising us that we don't need a 14-day quarantine," the commissioner told CNN's Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta. "What we will do is, the positive individual will be removed from the rest of the group. There will be a quarantine arrangement in each facility in each city and we'll do contact tracing for the individuals that we believe there was contact with and we will do point-of-care testing for those individuals, so minimize the likelihood that there's been a spread."

MLB hopes to begin the regular season in early July, but first it must convince its players, and the people around them, they will be safe. On Tuesday, the commissioner began to outline MLB's proposals with the MLB Players Association.

"We hope that we will be able to convince the vast majority of our players that it's safe to return to work," Manfred told CNN. "The protocols for returning to play, the health-related protocols, are about 80 pages in length. They're extraordinarily detailed.

"So we hope that we'll be able to convince them that it's safe. At the end of the day, however, if there's a player with either health conditions or just their own personal doubts, we would never try to force them to come back to work. They can wait until they feel they're ready to come."

Those protocols include everything from the cleanliness of chartered flights between series to reduced exposure by players to stadium workers. But testing will be the key to it all working, according to Manfred.

"All of our players would be tested multiple times a week -- PCR testing to determine whether or not they have the virus," Manfred told CNN. "That testing would be supplemented less frequently by antibody testing as well."

MLB is hoping to begin a second spring training -- the first was interrupted by the pandemic in March -- in June, followed by the start to the regular season in early July. But that's contingent on what the public health situation is at the time.

The plan is to play without fans at stadiums.

Manfred noted the situation isn't risk-free but that the league's goal is to reduce the risk as much as possible. The league has invested in a lab it normally uses in Utah for drug tests, converting it over to COVID-19 testing.

"The lab in Utah has assured us of a 24-hour turnaround on all of our tests," Manfred said. "So we feel comfortable that by doing multiple tests a week and trying to minimize that turnaround time, we're doing everything humanly possible to make sure that the players are safe."

There are other hurdles to restarting, including coming to an agreement with players on salary. Players have agreed to be paid just for the games they play this season, but the league might ask them to take even less.

"I think that whenever there's a discussion about economics, publicly people tend to characterize it as a fight," the commissioner said. "Me personally, I have great confidence that we'll reach an agreement with the Players Association -- both that it's safe to come back to work, and work out the economic issues that need to be resolved."

Manfred said the league is exploring many options for 2020, including rule changes, while also attempting to "enhance" a television-only product. Ultimately, he said, everyone wants to play and will do what they can to make it happen.

"Playing in empty stadiums is not a great deal for us economically, but our owners are committed to doing that because they feel it's important that the game be back on the field, and that the game be a sign of a beginning to return to normalcy to American life the way we've always enjoyed it," Manfred said.

"We're a big business, but we're a seasonal business, and unfortunately, this crisis began at kind of the low point in terms of us for revenue -- we hadn't quite started our season yet. And if we don't play a season, the losses for the owners could approach $4 billion."