It was stormy night before COVID-19 shut down MLB
It was just a normal spring — until it very much was not.
A year ago Thursday, the Dodgers beat the Milwaukee Brewers in a Cactus League game shortened by rain. When the night game ended and a soggy group of Dodgers trudged back to the locker room at Camelback Ranch, it was one of the last professional sports games to be played for months, the last time the Dodgers would be together as a team until July, the last time they would play in front of fans until the limited-capacity, neutral-site postseason bubble in Texas.
“It all happened really fast. It was kind of a shock for everybody, I think,” Dodgers utilityman Chris Taylor recalled of that night. “We had only heard about the pandemic, I may be wrong but I want to say it was like a few days or a week before that and nobody really knew what to think of it. We didn’t know if it was something we really had to take seriously or what was going on.
“Then, that was kind of a shocking moment for us all, the fact that it was that serious where we had to completely cancel the season – nobody knew really what to think. You kind of just went right back into offseason mode and we didn’t know when the season was going to start again. It was a weird time.”
The coronavirus had only barely crept onto the radar of the Dodger players before that night. At the time, talk centered around curtailing fan interaction — the players had been told not to sign autographs for fans at Camelback Ranch — and the farfetched possibility that some games might be played in empty stadiums. Reporters had been banned from clubhouses just that day with each team handling its media availability differently.
Then Utah Jazz forward Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19 and the NBA suspended its season. The NHL and MLB quickly followed suit.
“It just all kind of happened so fast,” Dodgers outfielder Matt Beaty recalled. “I think it was a night game here when we found out. Coming in from the game, coming in from the dugout, we saw the news that the NBA had been shut down and kind of figured that most of the other sports were going to follow. It just happened so fast.”
The morning after their last game, the Dodgers reported to Camelback Ranch, ready to work out only to get the news that spring training was over and everything was on hold — for how long, no one knew.
“It was strange,” Dodgers shortstop Corey Seager said. “It went from kind of, ‘Be careful, stay away from people’ to like ‘Go stay at home and not leave.’ So, it was definitely a shell shock.”
Pitcher Clayton Kershaw learned about the shutdown like many sports fans.
“I was watching the basketball game. I forget who was playing. But I remember them running off the court and (Dallas Mavericks owner) Mark Cuban’s reaction. I remember watching that,” Kershaw said. “Then I think we ended up coming in the next day to practice and then it was kind of like, ‘Okay, that’s it. Everybody go home.’”
Many of the players didn’t know where to go. Some stayed in Arizona and continued to work out. Some had housing arranged in Los Angeles in anticipation of the season and went there. Some scattered to their homes around the country.
“I stayed in Arizona the whole time. There were a couple guys who stayed back and continued to hit on the field – me, Kiké (Hernandez), (Max) Muncy, (Zach) McKinstry, a couple other guys,” Beaty said. “We were staying out here and we were still able to get on the fields at Camelback and stay as prepared as possible because there were a lot of rumors floating around about when we were going to play. We just wanted to be ready when it was time.”
During the shutdown, MLB and the players’ union bickered and bargained over how the sport could return. At times, it seemed as if they might not reach an agreement to bring the game back.
“I just recall that I thought it was going to be very short and very temporary,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said of his initial reaction. “To look back a year and still be going through things and still kind of getting adjusted is certainly not something we anticipated. And it was just an abrupt stop at that point in time. You’re kind of wondering when and if we’re going to go back.”
When baseball did come back, a whole new set of phrases had been added to the sport’s language — health and safety protocols, intake testing and contact tracing and bubbles. Witnessing it all were cardboard cutouts, lots of cardboard cutouts. But no fans.
“I think it was something, to be quite honest, we tried not to talk about very often,” Roberts said of the empty stadiums of 2020. “I think the Dodgers did a great job with the cardboard cutouts of the fans. I think we did as good of a job as we could have as far as piping in sound and fan noise.
“I think it was the elephant in the room that we understood and didn’t like that fans couldn’t be there. It’s just the way it was. Even in spring training, just to have fans right now is a big difference.”
A year later, the Dodgers are once again going through the routine of spring training. There are fans in the stands again — only about 2,400 for games at Camelback Ranch. There will be more when they open the season in Colorado (as many as 21,000) and even some when they return to Dodger Stadium in April.
The light of normalcy beckons from the end of a long, dark tunnel.
“I don’t think I really understood, like a lot of people, what was going on or what was going to go on. I’m thankful that it seems to be getting closer to a resolution with this which is awesome,” Kershaw said.