It’s becoming increasingly clear that the only way the Major League Baseball season can happen during the coronavirus pandemic would be by taking extreme measures to play games behind closed doors.
Last week, a possible plan that MLB considered went public that involved relocating the entire league to the Phoenix area and having the games take place at the city’s 10 spring training parks, two collegiate stadiums (ASU and GCU) and the Diamondbacks’ Chase Field as soon as May. Entire organizations would have to be confined to hotels, tested regularly for the coronavirus and live months in isolation.
The reaction to the idea was mixed from fans to players, and we can count Mike Trout among those skeptical of the plan.
In an interview with NBC Sports, Trout called the idea “pretty crazy.”
.@miketrout wants MLB to come back soon as possible, but brings up a number of issues that would have to be worked out logistically before baseball returns in any fashion. #LunchTalkNBCSN pic.twitter.com/TdPfIVI8Jp
— NBC Sports (@NBCSports) April 15, 2020
Trout said:
“I obviously want to play as fast as we can. Get to a city, maybe Arizona — they’re throwing out Florida. Being quarantined in a city … it would be difficult for some guys. What are you gonna do with family members? My wife is pregnant. What am I gonna do when she goes into labor? Am I going to have to quarantine for two weeks after I come back? Because obviously I can’t miss that birth of our first child. There’s a lot of red flags, a lot of questions. Obviously, we would have to agree on it as players. But I think the mentality is we want to get back as soon as we can, but obviously it’s gotta be realistic. We can’t be sitting in a hotel room, just going from the field to the hotel room and not being able to do anything. I think that’s pretty crazy.”
On Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci — the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases — voiced some support for the feasibility of the Arizona idea. But the U.S. would need to increase its testing capacity before the thousands of MLB players and staff members could responsibly get tested on a daily or even weekly basis.
Fauci also said that players would have to be “very well surveilled,” which didn’t seem to fly with Trout.
The brutal Arizona heat — where summer temperatures stay over 100 degrees even late at night — would also present a less-than-ideal playing experience under this scenario.
But if baseball does happen in 2020, this might be the only way.
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