ANOTHER ENDURANCE TEST
As league hopes to play a full season in 2021 in front of some noise, teams still recovering
By mid-march, after most teams had gotten used to the coronavirus protocols and made their first rounds of cuts, Alex Cora’s face already betrayed the unusual wear and tear of managing in these times.
For Cora, this Major League Baseball season is particularly complicated. He was fired as manager of the Boston Red Sox after his role in the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scandal became clear and he was suspended for the 2020 regular season and postseason. Boston rehired him in November, stirring further conversation about what forgiveness and redemption look like in a sport trying to answer a long list of uncomfortable questions.
Faith in industry leaders has been shaken by revelations about sexual harassment and the culture that facilitates it. Hopes for avoiding another devastating work stoppage have been destabilized by widespread mistrust among players, owners and MLB. Concerns about sustaining the game’s appeal linger as three true outcomes — the strikeout, the walk and the home run — dominate a sport beloved for the way unpredictability mixes with routine.
And in the middle of it all are players, coaches and managers such as Cora, who recently sat down for his morning Zoom call with reporters, pulled off his mask and bemoaned the face looking back at him on the screen.
“You like my tan — my mask tan lines?” he said, pointing to a mask-shaped light patch in the middle of his face.
“It’s awful. Awful,” he said, smiling. Then the usual daily baseball questions began.
On early spring mornings, sticky August afternoons and frigid late October evenings, survival in baseball is about quiet endurance, dogged compartmentalization and a willingness to wear even the unseemly effects of adversity as badges of honor.
But everyone is sporting bigger, shinier badges this year. Owners lost revenue. Young players lost a year of minor league games. Veterans lost a chance at milestones. Front offices lost reliable data upon which to make decisions because the 60 disjointed games teams did play last year were held in such unusually unstable circumstances that many executives have said they aren’t sure how much that sample can predict future behavior.
At the same time, MLB and the players’ union are on course for an ugly collision when the collective bargaining agreement expires in December. Fans are facing a few more months of limited opportunities to sit in ballparks, even as many players are reveling in the notion of having any fans at all on opening day. And everyone who loves the sport lost their sense of certainty, no longer assured that no matter what happens, baseball is the constant.
But involuntary departures from the norm have a way of making the banal feel beautiful.
After their first spring training game, played in front of a few thousand fans in Tampa, superstar Aaron Judge sat in the cold tub with Gleyber Torres and DJ Lemahieu — three highly scrutinized New York Yankees, used to the brightest lights in the land, talking about the joy of having butterflies in their stomachs before a game again.
“One of my favorite things is just interactions — between innings when you first run out there, the crowd, the energy, the roar, hearing them yell certain things, good things, bad things. You feed off that,” said Judge, who is known for playing catch with fans from the outfield.
Even Clayton Kershaw, future Hall of Famer and star of the defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers, felt something new this spring. After his first start on a quiet day in early March, Kershaw walked off the mound and waved to his family in the stands, where they hadn’t been in some time.
“It was fun getting to see my kiddos actually getting to sit in a seat and watch the games,” Kershaw said. “I got to wave to them. That was fun.”
In 2021, the Dodgers will try to end any discussion about the legitimacy of their short-season title by winning another one. They have sudden rivals in the San Diego Padres, who acquired elite starters on back-to-back days and obliterated offseason norms by giving a 14-year contract to 22-year-old shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr. — the kind of dynamic young star who could help increase the sport’s popularity.
Meanwhile, on the other coast, the National League East is promising a fascinating race as the under-new-ownership New York Mets, the ascending Atlanta Braves, the talented Philadelphia Phillies, the pitching-heavy Washington Nationals and the upstart Miami Marlins combine to make the division five could-be playoff teams deep.
That division is the exception to the norm because several small-market teams seem to be counting pennies instead of wins again — a pattern that frustrates players and big-market teams that subsidize their spending through revenue sharing.
Some teams held back in their spending as a result. The Tampa Bay Rays, as maddening for their unwillingness to pay up for homegrown stars as for their ability to keep winning without them, traded away the man who started Game 6 of the World Series for them, Blake Snell, and let another key starter, Charlie Morton, depart in free agency.
Others, such as the Padres and Dodgers, saw a chance to leapfrog more conservative competition. A year after winning the World Series with a team aided by its extensive starting pitching depth, the Dodgers committed a record $40 million to reigning National League Cy Young Award winner Trevor Bauer. They enter this season as early favorites to repeat as champions.
But to crown a repeat champion, the sport must play through October again, something newly bolstered coronavirus protocols designed to improve contact tracing and decrease potential exposure seem to be making more and more realistic.
While MLB wanted to delay the season at least a month until coronavirus case numbers fell further across the country, the union’s argument — that the relative success of the 2020 season proved MLB could proceed on its usual schedule — feels prescient, at least early on. On Friday, MLB had seen 17 positive tests out of 72,751 conducted, a 0.02 percent positive rate.
On Saturday, Red Sox reliever Matt Barnes tested positive for the coronavirus, sending Boston into a flurry of contact tracing and crossed fingers, a reminder of how fragile the stability will be.