(AP Photo/Charlie Riedel) Chaim Bloom, Boston Red Sox chief baseball officer Last year, baseball shut down on March 12, just a day after Rudy Gobert's positive test caused the NBA to suspend its season. So I asked some people around the game what they remember from those days when baseball first confronted the coronavirus.Ī player dons a mask during workouts at the 2021 version of spring training. But we’re not so far removed from that strange rupture last March that it isn’t worth reflecting on. From a distance, we’re talking about games again and the promise of a season to be played with fewer caveats and more reasonable stakes.
It’s a year later, spring training is back, although I am not there this time. But even as some of those were still underway word came from MLB: Spring training was suspended and the sport was plunged into abject uncertainty. The Grapefruit League hosted a few final grasps at baseball ahead of the inevitable. But he was wrong about one thing: that it would take a positive test to shutter spring training. His jarring assertion was righter than anyone else had been to that point. If somebody gets it, MLB will do the same thing the NBA did.”ĭarvish was calm and clear.
“At some point, someone will get coronavirus, I think. A basketball player had tested positive and the NBA season was already suspended: Was he concerned that someone in baseball might be next? There was a question about pitch count before finally someone mentioned COVID-19. Next, someone asked how it would feel to get the opening day start - “whenever opening day is,” the reporter acknowledged cryptically. The first question to Yu Darvish, who had pitched that night for the Cubs, was about what he was working on in the game, how his stuff felt. The postgame news conferences would be the first chance to force someone in baseball to talk about the looming health crisis that had hit the NBA first only by happenstance. I sent a bunch of texts that went unanswered to people in baseball who didn’t know any more than I did, and then raced to Sloan Park, where the Chicago Cubs were finishing up a meaningless game.
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On March 11, I watched the chaos unfold after Rudy Gobert tested positive just ahead of a Utah Jazz game in Oklahoma City on TV from my hotel room. Of course by April, lockdowns would span the country and the opposite coast would be the hardest hit.
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Internally, MLB was weighing whether the Mariners would have to move their opening series at home, but even Seattle players had little to say about the virus that had been detected in the Pacific Northwest. There had been a meeting to talk about safety, one said, but to be honest he hadn’t gone. I took a picture of pre-signed baseball cards that would ever so briefly replace interactions with fans, but the players barely knew what I was talking about. But when I got to the Cactus League, there was little to report on.