Shelton preparing for likely changes
Derek Shelton doesn’t want to speculate publicly on how or when baseball will return.
The Pirates manager has said as much over the past few weeks when answering questions about Major League Baseball’s delay amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, it’s part of Shelton’s job right now to build contingency plans, to think about what would be the best course of action for his team given any situation.
“[Bench coach Don Kelly] and I talk about 80 times a day,” Shelton said Monday in a conference call with local media. “I say that kind of halfjokingly, but I talk to him every day or text with him multiple times about different things. I think it keeps us both sane.
“I will say, the one thing he’s done an unbelievable job with is his communication on the staff and talking through it with them. But we have started talking through the different formats of what we would do and how we would do it. … We have to be prepared, and preparation’s a big part of it.”
In Florida, where Shelton lives, there have been steps taken to return life to normal. Some restaurants have reopened with new guidelines, allowing patrons to eat outside or inside with a reduced, guideline-compliant capacity. That’s an interesting development for baseball, since some of the possible return plans involve games played at spring training facilities in Florida, but it likely doesn’t mean the sport is any closer to returning.
An interesting question is how spring training might look if there are restrictions on the amount of people that can be in one facility. Say, for instance, that only 20-25 people are permitted to be in one place at a time. How would the Pirates split up their training?
“If we have to stagger, like if we have to start sooner and stagger it to get workouts in, we can more than accommodate that,” Shelton said. “To say how we would do it position-playerand pitcher-wise, it would probably be a mix. It would depend on what we’re trying to functionally do that day, and it may blend. But if they say you have to come back to spring training and you can only have 15 people, 20 people, or — to your example — 25 people, we would find a way around that to make sure we functionally got our work in.”
The larger point, though, relates to Shelton’s hesitation to speculate. The way he sees it, the Pirates and the rest of the league will have plenty of time to learn the new rules and implement strategies.
“The one thing about it is it’s not a situation where it’s going to be, ‘OK, hey, June 1, we’ve decided we’re going to play. June 2, we’re going to play. Here are the rules,’ ” he said.
“We’ll have some time to talk through them and adjust and go from there, and I think that’s what myself and Donnie and the staff will do. Even though there are rule changes coming into the year this year, there were going to be different things that happened that we were going to have to adapt and adjust, so I think that’s something we’ll do once we get back.”