UTK Special 5/5/2020
Nothing Up My Sleeve
I made a round of calls to sources - guys inside baseball and in the immediate baseball industry - while working on another story, but someone asked me something about halfway through that made me loop back and ask everyone. It was a simple, but powerful question:
“Why’s no one getting hurt now?”
He’s right, at least on the surface. There’s stories about what players are doing, from playing catch with wives to making kids look silly on Youtube.
What we don’t have is any stories about injuries that happen in the normal course of workouts. No one has lifted weights and hurt their back, a la JJ Watt? No one has run and sprained an ankle, a la Cam Newton? No one went hunting and injured themselves carrying a deer, a la Clint Barmes?
Nothing?
From my calls, which covered about 12 MLB teams and 3 NFL teams, just to make sure it wasn’t strictly a baseball thing, the answer is “yes, kinda.”
The kinda is the problem. “I don’t want to say zero,” said one MLB Athletic Trainer. “Did a guy sprain something and not tell me? Maybe. It’s same as his workouts. He can say one thing and do another, but we’ll know the second they show up.” By and large, everyone agreed with this sentiment.
With non-essential “elective” procedures opening up at most hospitals in the country, some think this would be a time where minor procedures could be taken care of and we’d see a rush. Even with the procedures on hold for almost a month in most places, none I spoke with said they knew of any of their players having something scheduled.
One issue that two teams noted is that they were going to have to essentially re-start camp, including physicals. “We didn’t have exit physicals, obviously, but we’re going to have to at least check to make sure nothing’s changed while they were gone. Maybe not the full workup since getting the docs here will be harder, but we’re going to look under the hood,” said one performance specialist.
Again, it’s important to note that we shouldn’t compare any of this, now, to anything else, so comparing random offseason injuries that occur to what have happened in the last couple months isn’t a great comparison. Players aren’t doing the same things and are for the most part, actually sitting around the house like the rest of us.
I’m still a bit surprised to see injuries go to near zero. I don’t believe anyone was lying to me and in this day and age, a minor injury might not even be a bad thing. Mike Trout stubbing his toe might lead SportsCenter.
It’s a reminder that with medical staffs and performance staffs working hard in a difficult situation, along with hard working players, have likely done a very good job in at least minimizing the problems. We’ve seen few players exposed to COVID — but that’s a topic for tomorrow.
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Never thought Trevor Plouffe would be breaking news like this, but it’s 2020":
And nothing against Trevor - he’s the latest to take the opportunity he earned on the field and flipped it to a media job. Good for him and what I’ve seen, he’s working hard and doing well. He’s obviously very close to current players, which is likely where he got this.
There had been persistent rumors over the last few weeks about teams needing to plan for camps to re-open, how long they would need, and where they will play. The government had been pushing for July 4th, which would be a big American celebration, but it seems July 1st is easier for everyone, though obviously we’ll see a bigger deal for the Fourth than recent years.
As Plouffe reported, teams expect to play at home. There’s one outlier and that’s Toronto, which is operating under Canadian rules at home, obviously, and the rules on cross-border traffic could be an issue. A source I spoke with from the Jays told me they had a couple plans and were waiting on baseball to make the final decision.
They could play in Toronto, with all the caveats about big cities, a big empty stadium, and the border issues, but also looked into playing in Dunedin, where they have spring training. That’s unlikely, since they would be very close to Tampa Bay and could cut into that market. (If the A’s can’t move to San Jose …)
There’s a third option as well, which is using minor league parks. Most have noted that there’s no real plan for the minor leagues to open or even report. That leaves a ton of high quality stadiums available. The easiest would be Buffalo, Toronto’s long time Triple-A affiliate, but if cross-border issues are a thing, do Jays fans wanted to be taunted by their team playing nearby but inaccessibly? (Don’t even get me started on blackout issues.)
It’s more likely that MLB could use this as a tryout for cities, since there have been credible reports that MLB could use expansion as a piggy-bank to get past pandemic losses. That would put Portland, Charlotte, Las Vegas, and perhaps a few more in the mix. The Jays official I spoke with said the team was adamant that they wouldn’t barnstorm and that travel and stay issues would have to be addressed, but we’ll have to see how this plays out.
For the rest of the teams, I don’t see any way they don’t get back to baseball very soon, perhaps as soon as May 15th. That’s two weeks to round up the troops, open up camps, and get back to the business of baseball, which at this point will include figuring out the new rules of baseball. Expect big ones, including traveling with the entire 40-man roster.
I’ll leave the discussion of that to prospect gurus and guys like Joe Sheehan, but the 40-man games teams have to play might have some unexpected consequences. There’s always some guys who have to be on the 40 to avoid the Rule 5 but aren’t ready to play. Would a team be at a disadvantage if they had this player on the roster, essentially Rule 5-ing themselves? And service time issues come into play as well. (Off the top of his head, Jamey Newberg thought of three guys like that on the Texas Roster. Joel Henard barely took longer to list a handful.)
Again, uncharted territories lead to unintended consequences. This is going to be a year that isn’t going to be ‘81 or ‘95 or anything else. Games will be lost and “flu like symptoms” suddenly isn’t chuckle-worthy. Player health is even more of a consideration this year and I’ll be honest - “I don’t know” doesn’t feel uncertain enough.