Uncertainty surrounding coronavirus has not spared MLB or the St. Louis Cardinals
The St. Louis Cardinals spring training complex in Jupiter, Fla. has gone all but silent as Major League Baseball continues to scale back operations due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus.
After an unprecedented week which saw coordination across the major sports leagues in North America, Major League Baseball announced on Monday that it would follow guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control restricting events hosting 50 or more people for the next eight weeks. To that end, opening day of the 2020 season will be postponed until, at a bare minimum, the middle of May.
Many players have opted to remain in the area at least until the completion of their housing arrangements for spring training, and some others maintain year-round homes in Florida, making decamping a moot point. Lefty Kwang Hyun Kim, a native and resident of South Korea, was urged by the club to remain in Florida and has opted to do so.
The uncertainty which has grafted onto so many corners of society at large has not left baseball untouched. While Monday’s announcement serves to further delay the start of the season by default, many in the industry are skeptical that the season could begin before June 1.
Commissioner Rob Manfred told reporters in Florida on Monday that the league still intends to play a full 162-game season, but it’s unclear whether that would be possible in such a compressed time frame.
Whether the Cardinals come out of this delay with a competitive advantage will also be difficult to judge ahead of games being played.
Pitchers Miles Mikolas and Andrew Miller were likely to begin the season on the injured list; a delay may eliminate those absences. Likewise, reliever Brett Cecil will have additional time to recover from a hamstring injury and attempt to show game readiness when the club reconvenes, likely in Florida on a date yet to be determined.
The physical buildup which is at the core of spring training poses a difficult challenge for teams to overcome at the inevitable start of the season. The Cardinals completed 30 of their scheduled 40 days of spring camp and were close to allowing starting pitchers to reach their endurance ceilings.
Thursday’s last Grapefruit League was the first in which the Cardinals allowed their pitchers to bat rather than be replaced by a designated hitter, which is traditionally one of the markers of the pending home stretch.
Myriad other issues surrounding the logistics of baseball are yet to be determined. Minor league players are set to receive their per diem allotments for food and housing through the original scheduled end date of spring training, but their pay beyond that point has not been established.
Like their major league counterparts, minor league players not on the 40-man roster don’t receive paychecks during spring training. Unlike their rostered brethren, they often subsist on relatively meager wages which are only paid during the months of the year in which games are being played.
While the MLBPA is offering $1,100 per week in assistance to players between the scheduled conclusion of spring training and April 9th, players who aren’t on a 40-man roster or don’t have a certain amount of service time in the union will be ineligible to receive those funds. In many cases, the players most in need of money will be least able to access it.
The declaration of a national emergency by President Trump also allows Manfred to invoke a clause in baseball’s collective bargaining agreement which could prevent players from being paid until the emergency subsides. That determination has yet to be made, and though it seems unlikely that Manfred and baseball’s ownership groups would risk such an outwardly antagonistic stance toward the players, the standard player contract is drafted in such a way as to allow for the possibility.
In 1995, teams played only 144 games as camps ramped up late following the cessation of a strike which began in 1994. In 1981, a midseason strike resulted in teams playing an unequal amount of games; the Kansas City Royals played only 103, and the San Francisco Giants led the league with 111.
The Cardinals’ planned trip to London in June, where they were set to play two games against the Cubs, has not yet been postponed or cancelled, but would seem at this point to be unlikely to be played as scheduled. The officially announced delay is already set to push back the club’s home opener, jeopardizing a rare visit from the Baltimore Orioles, formerly the St. Louis Browns.
On Sunday, the New York Yankees announced that a minor league player tested positive for the virus, marking the first known case of infection in a professional baseball player. The rapidly evolving situation has teams assessing plans on an hour-by-hour basis, creating significant discomfort for the stakeholders involved in these processes.
With the start of baseball comes the start of summer and the accompanying excitement of a new year. For now, that excitement is delayed. Renewal has been deferred, and the next steps for major league baseball are far from yet being determined.
