BLUE JAYS SEARCH FOR A NEST — ANY NEST
The rundown is never a comfortable place for anyone on a baseball team to be caught.
Whether nailed between first and second, third and home or wherever it may be on the basepaths, the outcome is rarely good.
Toronto Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro may have found him in the most high-stakes version imaginable of such a no-win predicament as he attempts to find a place for his team to convene not just for training camp in less than a week but to play the abbreviated 2020 season.
Such is the plight of running what is essentially a homeless baseball team, one that still doesn’t know where to tell its players to report or where it will play any of its 30 home games in a 60-game schedule approved earlier this week.
Goal No. 1 for Shapiro is to operate in the same fashion of the other 29 Major League Baseball front offices — have both training camp and the regular season based at their home ballparks.
As unrealistic as that idea was a week ago, the disaster that is Florida became even worse with a COVID -19 strength dose of desperation to the task facing Jays management.
Thanks to the outbreak of positive tests with players and staff in Florida, as of Thursday evening, the Jays are a team with an urgency to get back together but with no fixed address.
MLB has for the most part stayed quiet about the Jays plight, but of all the back-to-work headaches, the troubles facing the only foreign-based team has to be high on commissioner Rob Manfred’s agenda.
At some point, schedules have to be released by the league and safety protocols established. Tough to do without a home as the Canada-u.s. border remains shut to non-essential travel until at least July 21, two days before
the 2020 season is scheduled to begin.
The Jays options remain less than stellar. Remaining in Florida never was ideal, even with a renovated TD Ballpark in Dunedin, a stadium that has been enhanced with improved lighting. Temperatures in July and August are sizzlingly brutal and late-day storms are a real concern. (There’s a reason the Rays play under a roof at Tropicana Field, after all.)
Buffalo, home of the Triple-a Bisons, has some appeal but in terms of facilities, it’s less than ideal as a home.
So the best case venue remains Rogers Centre in downtown Toronto, one that might be the least viable should Canadian officials play hard ball and refuse to relax the restrictions for baseball players.
That leaves the task to the Jays to lobby the Canadian and Ontario governments, in an attempt to
convince them that foreign baseball players are worthy of special treatment denied to its citizens.
If you buy the notion that Canadians have been doing the pandemic thing far more responsibly that Americans — and the numbers support this, obviously — it could be a hard point to sell.
Opening the gates to pro baseball players from multiple cities undoubtedly be met coolly from Canadian medical experts (and no doubt the public and some politicians) who will prefer American-based athletes stay far, far away from the Canadian border they are currently banned from crossing.
While the Jays were not particularly shocked with Wednesday’s development in which tests came back reporting that multiple players and staff based in Dunedin had tested positive for the virus, it certainly was alarming.
Obviously the Jays have to make a decision — and soon —
though they could open training camp in Dunedin and shift it here part way through if given the clearance.
The green light may be slow to arrive, however, if it all.
In some quarters, the argument against will be seen as a strong one, notably why should professional athletes be exempted from rules the rest of the country has been living under for more than three months now? And secondly, why would a government clear the path for those same athletes given that a portion of them have already proven incapable of avoiding the virus?
Factor in that visiting teams in the Jays 10-team vision would be coming from New York, Philadelphia, Miami, Tampa, Atlanta and more and the Jays case will be weakened even further.
Shapiro and the Jays lobby, which has been active for a while now, will surely counter with a well formulated plan. As
one option, they will no doubt present a plan suggesting that the Jays can essentially operate under a bubble which would have teams shuttle directly from Pearson airport to the Rogers Centre where players can be housed in the hotel attached to the stadium.
The Jays will argue that if the NHL has received clearance for Canadian cities to become playoff hubs, why not baseball? The hockey plan is more of a bubble, however, and doesn’t include travel and a rotating cast of characters.
These won’t be easy days ahead for Shapiro, who has to have coaching and support staff and 60 players report to a venue and undergo testing prior to July 1. It’s a complicated potential season for every North American pro sports team, but none have the unique challenges facing the Jays.