A look back at the day COVID-19 shut down baseball.
One year later, Oakland’s manager, players and beat writer remember when MLB came to a halt
bSA, ARIZ. >> It was raining in Arizona in mid-March. In retrospect, that was may have been a warning sign.
Major League Baseball suspended spring training on March 12, 2020, the day after the NBA’s league-wide shut- down was prompted by Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert testing positive for the coronavirus. Now exactly one year later, all those shocking moments that began this era of restriction that felt uncomfortable and shocking feels painfully routine now.
Even after one of the most traumatic years in world history, the moments leading up to the shutdown that March
day at Hohokam Stadium still hits close to home for Oakland A’s players and staff.
A day earlier, the A’s were on their way to play the Los Angeles Angels in Tempe, but the game was canceled due to pounding rains. Perhaps it was for the best; the team gathered for one of many meetings they’d have about the uncertain state of the baseball season.
“I remember it as a dark day,” manager Bob Melvin said recently. “On the way we got a call (the Angles game) canceled, and next thing you know we’re having meetings with the group a couple days in a row and all of the sudden it’s shut down.”
Outside of the A’s clubhouse, normalcy was rapidly deteriorating, too. Fans had only just watched the A’s lose to the Kansas City Royals at Hohokam two days prior. Reporters had been barred from entering clubhouses, gathering instead outside in hopes that some players would trickle out to speak — with six feet of distance between recorder and player. Melvin moved his pregame media sessions to a bench outside, in the dugout, where reporters had to stay clear as they asked questions about the safety of playing a sport with a health crisis looming. Reporters were asking questions on a subject we couldn’t wrap our heads around, seeking answers no one truly knew.
The prospect of a suspended season felt so unbelievable that reporters even kept the baseball-related questions flowing. A.J. Puk had thrown for the first time on March 11 after suffering a shoulder strain. Stephen Piscotty had a rib injury; at the time, a few extra days to recover while this whole coronavirus thing sorted itself out could have been a silver lining to the delay.
Frequent hand sanitization and hand-washing seemed the only tangible preventative solution to curbing this mysterious virus that would soon grip an entire globe. No one wore masks. No one had a mask.
Nothing felt real until Melvin came out the day after the NBA shutdown and spoke. Watching fans and NBA players flee stadiums en masse — that’s when it became real for him. Shutdowns across sports were imminent.
“It’s time to slow down,” Melvin said then — it was the last time reporters have seen him or any Athletics player or coach in person.
“I think what hit home was what happened last night in the NBA,” Melvin said a year ago. “When clubhouses are in jeopardy … I think they handled it beautifully. It becomes real, not that it wasn’t before, but more so when you hear stuff like that. Especially within the sports community.”
Inside the A’s clubhouse: disbelief. In meetings in the days leading up to the shutdown, players couldn’t quite fathom that they’d have to get shut down, too.
“Personally, I thought — I’m gonna say 80% of the players said OK, a couple weeks, we’ll be back,” A’s reliever Jake Diekman said. “Perfect. We stayed an extra month here. But this was way more massive than anything we could have thought of.”
Hours after Melvin last spoke with reporters that March 12 afternoon — a scheduled game against the Los Angeles Dodgers a far distant thought — MLB shut down the season.
“I think we saw the NBA get shut down and thought, ‘It’s not going to happen to us.’ Then it happened to us,” A’s pitcher Chris Bassitt said. “Then ... what happens next?”
What followed was months of uncertainty. Some big league teams kept their complexes open for players. On March 13, the A’s told all their players to go home. Suddenly, the 2020 season that was supposed to be their year was in peril.
That March day, MLB suspended the regular season for at least two weeks. Those two weeks turned into four months before baseball reconvened for summer camp and a 60game regular season.
Without any clarity during those four months on when or how a season would progress, players had no idea how to maintain their bodies, arms and bats. Should pitchers keep their arm in shape? With most of the world shut down, where could they?
“That whole break from spring training to summer camp, it was very weird,” Diekman said. “You didn’t want to throw a bullpen every two, three days because you didn’t know how long it would be. But you still wanted to keep your arm in shape.”
Back in Mesa again, the new normal is truly normal. Protocols that felt foreign and scary last summer have become routine this spring. The A’s are only accessible on one side of a Zoom call. Testing for COVID-19 has been ritualized — and managing any positive cases is met with a frame of reference. Masks are not only everywhere but are as routine as putting on your shoes. Even the sparsest crowd doesn’t go unnoticed.
Baseball hit the lowest low a year ago — and the game is recovering. The hope now is that baseball can keep moving forward into an uninterrupted 162game season.
“Everyone has that much more expertise in how to deal with this,” Melvin said. “At the beginning of spring its semi-normal with how we had to deal with it last year. But we have a long way to go.”