Signs of baseball returning at Tampa facility

Florida, MLB still plotting when to start season

TAMPA, Fla. — As this city tried to get back to its new “normal” on Wednesday morning, the Yankees minor league facility sat quiet, fields pristinely manicured, but mounds covered. Next door, in the Raymond James parking lot, the huge tents and orange cones were all that remained of what was one of Hillsborough County’s drive-thru coronavirus testing sites. On the corner, about a dozen people, some dressed in red-white-and-blue sequins held up signs in front of TV camera, demanding Florida reopen bars.

Across the street, however, there was one small, tangible sign that something resembling normal was going on inside the locked gates at George M. Steinbrenner Field. A roughed-up, battered and freshly bruised batting practice ball was nestled into the hedgeline, just outside the park. Inside the double fences, behind privacy screens, about half a dozen position players including Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton and Miguel Andujar, worked out on the backfields at the complex as they have done for most of the last 10 weeks, in hopes of a 2020 baseball season.

As Major League Baseball and the union continue to try and lay down a health, safety and financial foundation to restart baseball, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis threw open the gates to try and lure MLB and other pro sports to the state.

“We would love to have Major League Baseball. And I think the message is that our people are starved to have some of this back in their lives. It’s an important part of people’s lives,” DeSantis said.

The league and the union have huge