National Post (National Edition)
Play ball?
The comeback plan for baseball didn’t include a still-raging pandemic, but here we are.
At 7:07 on Thursday evening, Matt Shoemaker threw the first pitch in a reasonable facsimile of competitive baseball game at the Rogers Centre.
The pitch, a ball high and tight to his teammate Danny Jansen in an intrasquad game, smacked into Reese McGuire’s glove with an echoing pop, which is what happens when games are played in an empty amphitheatre. That toss came 104 days — give or take a few hours — after baseball was supposed to begin this season at the home park of the Toronto Blue Jays. Where it goes from here remains an utter mystery.
While professional sports in the time of COVID have returned with few hiccups in Europe and Asia, the process has been decidedly less smooth on this continent. Major League Soccer has withdrawn two teams from its MLS is Back Tournament in Orlando, Fla., after each was beset by a rash of coronavirus cases, meaning MLS is now Mostly Back. There have been positive COVID-19 cases among NHL and NBA teams that have resumed team workouts in advance of various bubble scenarios that those leagues hope will allow them to finish their interrupted 2020 seasons.
PGA Tour golfers and their caddies have been pulled out of events after positive tests, and a charity tennis tournament was shut down when one of its hosts, Novak Djokovic, was found to have the virus. The winner of 17 Grand Slams has since complained that he is the victim of a “witch hunt” who was only trying to do something nice when he invited some pals for matches and also shirtless nightclub revelry that was caught on video.
But it is Major League Baseball where things at present seem the most precarious. After the league shut down alongside every other league in mid-March as the pandemic widened, it at one point looked the most likely to return first. The sport could be played with minimal physical contact, and the massive 162-game schedule could have been trimmed without anyone making too much of a fuss. But a protracted labour fight led to MLB eventually imposing a wee little 60-game schedule that is to begin at the end of July. That has brought about a mad scramble to get teams back to their home cities and participating in a leaguewide COVID testing system that is run out of a repurposed drug lab in Utah. There have been multiple failures of that system already, with delayed results and missed tests that have caused several teams to scrap workouts because they couldn’t be sure that players were virus-free. Meanwhile, the Washington Post has reported that two charter flights that brought players back from the Dominican Republic included players who since tested positive for COVID-19. No one had been screened before boarding those flights.
That the league’s testing protocol is so shaky is particularly worrisome given the situation in the United States, where confirmed coronavirus infections are climbing, especially across the Sun Belt. Unlike the bubble concepts that other leagues are using, MLB will have teams playing in home parks and moving around communities where the virus is evidently still spreading rapidly. For months, the talk of the return of sports was a theoretical one: Could it be done while cities were locked down and people were stuck at home? Was it fair to ask players and staff to put them themselves at personal risk, and in some form of isolation for months, just so the big-money sports machine could be jumpstarted? And how controlled would the virus have to be before such a thing could be considered?
But the intervening weeks and events in the States have forced some uncomfortable compromises. Lockdowns have eased, but it’s now a dead certainty that resumed game action will take place with COVID numbers still climbing in cities where sports was originally planned to be a welcome distraction after months of fear and boredom. The frequent virus testing that they will do on players and staff, will now take place as some health authorities are reporting shortages of those resources for the public. As much as every league and team has insisted that the return-to-play plans have been developed with safety as a first priority, a relaunch amid a raging pandemic is not what anyone had in mind.
No team in any sport is aware of that problem quite so acutely as the Blue Jays. The organization essentially fled Dunedin, Fla., home of their spring training site, after multiple positive tests, but first they had to negotiate permission to enter Canada as long as they promised to confine themselves to the Rogers Centre and its adjoining hotel.
While some teams began workouts last week, the Jays didn’t even arrive in Toronto until late Sunday night — and a dozen of them were delayed in Florida until they could be cleared to travel. Some of those arrived late Thursday night. The team will spend two weeks ensconced in the shadow of the CN Tower, but as of yet do not know where they will play their 30 home games if the mini-season is actually held. The organization is trying to convince the federal and provincial governments that it can host games — and visiting U.S. teams — at the dome and hotel without undue risk to public safety, but they may yet end up back in Dunedin or in Buffalo, N.Y., home of their minor-league affiliate.
For now, it is games like the one on Thursday night inside the spooky quiet of the dome. Media were not tested but were checked for a fever and screened at the entrance, swearing that they didn’t have a list of symptoms that ranged from headaches and chills to “COVID toes,” which are apparently a thing, and were penned up in the 200 level, well away from close contact with the players. Pre-game interviews were conducted via Zoom, which brought the weird spectacle of a bunch of mask-wearing reporters on a video conference with Bo Bichette, interrogating him with only our eyes.
Bichette, the star Jays infielder with the chill surfer vibe, at least seems uniquely well-suited to this moment. He talked about his excitement to be playing again, and said that even with all the weird restrictions, baseball was still baseball. He acknowledged that there were “definitely concerns” with the testing problems other teams had experienced, but he sure didn’t sound too fussed. “If something happens where we are delayed or we can’t play, it is what it is,” Bichette said. (On a related note, “it is what it is” could also be the slogan for the U.S. federal pandemic response.)
Asked if he was comfortable having to live out of hotels for potentially three months — even if the Jays are allowed to play games in Toronto they will have to observe quarantine at the hotel — Bichette said he was fine with it. “Sometimes we are put in situations where you are out of your comfort zone,” he said. He didn’t think his teammates would struggle to deal with it. And as if to underscore the point, he crushed a ball into the second deck in left field in his first trip to the plate about an hour later.
The sound off the bat was a crack like a gunshot, which isn’t unusual. It was the silence that followed, the void of the absent crowd, that was strange.