Maintaining the COVID-19 ‘bubble’ on the road is St. Louis Cardinals new challenge
In a typical year, on a typical game day on the road, the St. Louis Cardinals will have two bus trips to bring the players to the field from the hotel.
In many cities, those two trips are made by one vehicle. Players needing treatment or early work — or without as much service time as their teammates — arrive early, and others follow.
In 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, nothing is typical. In an era of social distancing and meticulous sterilization, two trips have become three or four, each with their own conveyance.
The club is “certainly recognizing that we’re going to need more seats than what we have had historically,” said President of Baseball Operations John Mozeliak, as he outlined the team’s plan for getting players safely to and from nine ballparks in eight cities during 2020’s 60-game sprint.
The operations manual which governs the health and safety restrictions under which the season will be played outlines a litany of requirements for travel, some of which would fall under the category of common courtesy.
It’s now mandated, for instance, that a player flushes the toilet on the team plane after use. One would hope that had not been an issue before.
Cardinals reliever Giovanny Gallegos admitted to some trepidation about getting on an airplane — for other reasons entirely — when leaving spring training in Florida. He instead chose to drive to his home near the west coast of Mexico, choosing three full days alone in the car over a commercial flight.
“When you think back to March 12th,” Mozeliak said of the day on which spring training was halted, “there was obviously national and global concern about COVID, but I think some people at that time weren’t even remotely close to the severity of what we were dealing with.
“I can remember sitting in a meeting and having a discussion on sort of the time, which was very much unknown to everyone. But I didn’t think this was going to be measured in days, and even weeks on how long we were going to be gone. I really felt like we’re talking months.”
Now, months later, the Cardinals have managed to assemble nearly their full team.
Gallegos was late arriving to summer camp due to unexplained travel delays, but was able to throw during the shutdown and will soon be added to the active roster.
Génesis Cabrera and Alex Reyes each tested positive for the coronavirus and are working at the team’s alternate training site in Springfield to catch up and ready themselves for active duty.
Maintaining the bubble in St. Louis has been challenging, but manageable. Doing so on the road is a substantially more difficult proposition.
The Miami Marlins’ bubble was apparently burst during the season-opening series on the road in Philadelphia. As of Monday morning, a dozen Marlins players had tested positive for COVID-19, prompting the cancellation of their home opener Monday against Baltimore.
“We’re going to enter into an environment that there’s some things we hope we can control and some things that we do control,” Mozeliak said. “And the things that we hope we can control are the cleanliness of your plane, the cleanliness of your busses, the cleanliness of your hotel rooms. And being able to really orchestrate the movement between these different vehicles to get back into the bubble of the ballpark.”
Pitcher Miles Mikolas, who’s set to start the team’s second road game of the season on Wednesday in Minneapolis, said that his experience pitching overseas should help him adjust quickly to the new reality.
“When I was in Japan, we didn’t leave the hotel much on road trips either,” Mikolas explained. “They do things a little different there. In Tokyo we would leave the hotel in our uniforms. We’d get to the field in our uniform, and you’d play. You could shower and change, but then you wear your uniform back essentially to the hotel.
“And they do all the laundry and stuff there. So I’ve been a part of many not standard (things) by MLB specifications, not standard situations. So I don’t think it’s gonna be a very big deal for me personally.”
While the operations manual does strongly encourage players to shower away from the ballpark after playing or working out, it’s difficult to imagine that being a frequent occurrence. Instead, as a practical matter, Mikolas concurred that a degree of “peer pressure” will be necessary to maintain the necessary discipline.
“I think I can speak for our team pretty positively that we have a pretty good idea of what’s at stake,” Mikolas said. “No one wants to get sick, whether it’s this thing, this virus or the flu or a stomach ache or a cold, the sniffles. No one wants to get sick, and it’s just kind of mitigating that and if it means not getting your favorite wings from a city and just eating the hotel food or eat at the field, it is what it is.”
Mozeliak, who plans to travel on at least the first two road trips, said the club’s “space will be respected no matter where we stay.”
The operations manual calls for security at hotels to prevent fans from gathering in public areas to hound players for autographs or selfies, and there’s only so much subterfuge possible with a Major League traveling party. There are, after all, only so many approved hotels.
“Everything we’ve experienced here in our summer camp is something that we have to try to do when we travel,” Mozeliak emphasized. “We have to practice things that can keep us safe.
“What that looks like is people wearing their masks, people being very conscious of their hand hygiene, people being respectful of physical distancing. When you couple all that together, you have a chance of making this work.”
