It doesn’t seem there’s enough time to get ready
SAN FRANCISCO >> It’s not “Spring Training.” No, it’s “Summer Camp.”
And while there is enthusiasm and good cheer around the ballpark during these practice sessions ahead of Major League Baseball’s 60-game regular season, there’s also a nasty truth looming over the operation.
And I’m not talking about the coronavirus.
Though that’s certainly there, in spades.
No, it’s the fact that the demolition-derby-style campaign — a regular season in which each game will take on outsized importance because of scarcity — is scheduled to begin in only twoand-a-half weeks.
Are two weeks of practice and a handful of exhibition games adequate preparation for a baseball season?
Listening to the Giants and A’s this weekend, I’m not getting the impression it is.
“Obviously we’d love to have a little bit longer to get in baseball shape and get our timing down and get our approach down and do whatever we have to do to
get ready for a season. But this is the hand we’re dealt, so we’re going to deal with it as well as we can,” Brandon Belt said Sunday.
“It’s not going to be perfect. No part of this season is going to be perfect ... and I think just knowing that helps my mindset a little bit. If you expect everything to be normal and the way it was, you’re going to have a problem adjusting. Just acknowledging that it’s different definitely has gone a long way.”
We should all appreciate Belt’s positive mindset, but let’s be real about the situation: With 60-player pools, one-diamond, home-stadium practices, and peculiar and seemingly scattershot COVID-19 testing protocols, the logistics of starting a baseball season on short notice were already a hot mess.
It should be noted that neither the Giants nor the A’s have been able to bring every player in their pool to camp yet.
But given the lack of preparation time — spring training usually lasts six or seven weeks and includes 25-30 games and countless practice opportunities — the on-field play when real games start might be a hot mess, too.
“It feels like we’re five days behind with our position players right now,” A’s manager Bob Melvin told reporters Sunday after Oakland postponed its first full-squad workout because of a lag in COVID-19 test results. “That’s not really the case, but it feels like it.”
And adding to the complexity is the fact that, while some Giants and A’s players were able to use team facilities in Arizona or were in states without strict lockdowns during the last few months, many more were not able to properly train for the upcoming season during the break. They came into camp cold.
For instance: Giants catcher Buster Posey. He stayed in the Bay Area during the shutdown and was only able to hit off a tee during that time.
“I’ve been at my house,” Posey said. “I got with the hitting coaches and put together a plan and followed the plan for, gosh, I don’t even know how many weeks it ended up being. But that’s one of the challenges that you face — you just gotta do the best you can with it.”
Conventional baseball wisdom is that hitters start the season well behind pitchers. If some hitters are just now seeing live pitching for the first time in months, is a couple of weeks enough time to catch up?
Remember: each game will matter roughly three times more than the games from a standard 162-game season.
Or maybe it won’t matter, because pitchers are seemingly behind schedule, too.
Throwing arms take time to “stretch out” and with the recent epidemic of elbow and arm injuries in the sport, teams are being careful not to push their pitchers. It’s the smart move. The likelihood is that by the time the 60-game regular season starts, pitchers won’t be far enough along in their throwing schedule to go more than a handful of innings.
“There’s not enough time on
the calendar,” Giants manager said Gabe Kapler said Saturday.
Sunday, Kapler added: “The expectation that pitchers are going to go out and throw like five or six innings in the first series, I just don’t think that’s realistic right now.”
Right now, no one knows what a pitching rotation will look like in 2020. There have been suggestions of three-man rotations (down from the usual five) with “openers” aplenty. There could be six, seven, even eight “starters” in the rotation, too. We might not know until well after the season starts, if at all.
This pandemic was already an accelerator, and that’s likely to have big consequences on a sport like baseball — a macro sport rooted in tradition.
Will any of these pitchers be allowed to throw enough pitches to reach the five innings a starter needs to qualify for a win? Perhaps we’re looking at every game being a Johnny Wholestaff contest. Fun!
Maybe hitters can adapt to a shortened preseason and come out of the gates slugging. Or perhaps the sport will set another whole-season strikeout record in only 37 percent of the time because no one can handle 99-mph heat for weeks.
Yes, the sport might be back — that we can all celebrate — but because of a pandemic and a collective bargaining showdown, the likelihood is high that things are about to become extremely funky in Major League Baseball. And forgive me for wondering it could all be avoided by a couple more weeks of preseason and a few more days in the cold come the fall.