Boon for sports:
Giants: Team hoping to be able to train in S.F. for sport’s reboot
The Giants’ hopes of training in S.F. were boosted by the new order. The Warriors are set to reopen Chase Center for voluntary workouts.
Chances that the Giants will hold a second spring training at Oracle Park rather than Arizona grew significantly Thursday with the city’s decision to allow sports practices to resume Monday and games without fans to begin June 15.
The Giants still have not decided which way they will go, but they have been leaning toward San Francisco over Phoenix for a variety of reasons, including health and safety.
Team officials have told The Chronicle that hurdles remain before they
can pick San Francisco, but one person involved in the discussions said Thursday’s decision by the city “is a big one.”
Those who spoke to The Chronicle for this story requested anonymity to discuss a city decision that had not yet been made public and a team decision that has not been formalized.
Questions remain, the biggest being when Spring Training 2.0 will begin, if it happens at all. That remains in the hands of Major League Baseball and the Players Association, who are engaged in increasingly antagonistic negotiations regarding health and safety, and salaries, should the 2020 season begin.
MLB officials hope to begin the new spring training June 10, with an 82game regular season beginning July 4, but the lack of progress in negotiations has imperiled those dates.
If they stand, the city’s new order would allow the Giants to begin their practices and games in the city within MLB’s proposed timeline.
Wherever the Giants train, they will need to modify their facilities to follow guidelines approved in baseball negotiations and those handed down by the city. That will be complicated. The owners’ first health and safety proposal to the players required 67 pages.
“We’ve got to make sure all of the protocols are in place at the facility, but that’s doable,” a team official said.
The Giants’ facilities in Arizona are better equipped than Oracle Park for spring training because they have more fields at their disposal. Also, many players live there fulltime.
However, the stifling summer heat in Arizona would be an issue. So, too, is Arizona’s decision to reopen May 15 following its coronavirus shutdown.
The Giants believe the Bay Area’s more conservative approach to reopening would make San Francisco safer for players, coaches and other staff members who need to participate in the practices.
The Chronicle has reported that the A’s also prefer to train in Northern California, but they remain locked out of the Coliseum pending a new order from Oakland or Alameda County, which is seeing a significant uptick in COVID19 cases.
In theory, the Giants could share Oracle Park with the A’s for training and even games, although the Giants might need the park for a good portion of each practice day so they can abide by distancing requirements and train in shifts.
The MLB’s health and safety documents suggest that majorleague teams look into shuttered college ballparks in their areas as potential training sites. The Giants, for instance, could rent fields at Stanford or Cal — assuming the local jurisdictions would allow it — or USF or San Francisco State. That would give the club more diamonds, mounds and batting cages in which to practice and could be used for minorleaguers to train.
That creates its own set of hurdles, namely forcing teams to set up multiple coronavirus testing sites and modify more ballparks to ensure their safety under the guidelines.