MLB clunks back to life
Among those we know was participating was the team’s top pitching prospect, Nate Pearson. The hard-throwing right-hander posted a picture to his Instagram account with the caption “we made it.”
It remains to be seen when the rest of the Jays players join their teammates in what has already become a challenging training camp for the American League club.
With camps allowed to begin this past Friday, the Jays weren’t given clearance to cross the Canada-u.s. border until the previous day and had to pass intake testing before getting its charter flight plans in place.
Because of the strict quarantine protocol the Jays proposed to follow to gain clearance from Canadian government and medical authorities, the players who remain in Florida must first record two negative tests. Once that green light is achieved, the team will have to fly those players by charter to keep the isolation precautions in place.
The Jays weren’t the only MLB team to experience difficulties on Monday with both 2019 World Series participants — the reigning champion Washington Nationals and the Houston Astros — cancelling onfield activities because of a delay in receiving testing results.
Those developments prompted a late afternoon statement from the league saying that despite some delays in getting the results from a lab in utah, 95 per cent of the initial round of tests have been completed.
“We appreciate the great co-operation from the players as well as the hard work of the clubs under these challenging circumstances,” the league said in a statement. “The process has not been without unforeseen difficulties, which are being addressed with the service providers that are essential to the execution of the protocol.”
Those circumstances didn’t sit well with some teams, as Nationals GM Mike Rizzo told reporters in Washington.
“We will not sacrifice the health and safety of our players, staff and their families,” Rizzo said. “Without accurate and timely testing it is simply not safe for us to continue with summer camp.”
And therein lies one of the great challenges for teams around MLB: The necessity of safety precautions squaring off with the urgency of a too-short training period leading to an abbreviated season.
Which brings us back to a Jays team without a true home and with potentially close to a fifth of its 60-man roster absent for who knows how long.
The players who are here will continue to work on the field, while behind the scenes the front office will work to secure the Rogers Centre for its 30 regular-season home dates. That process was never going to be an easy one and it’s hard to imagine it not getting more complicated by the day given the spreading footprint the COVID crisis is inflicting on the sport.