Blue Jays still adapting one year after MLB's COVID-19 shutdown

TORONTO – Inside the visitors’ clubhouse at LECOM Park after batting practice one year ago Friday, Cavan Biggio glanced up at a TV and watched a lengthy list of COVID-19 shutdowns scroll across the screen. The previous day, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic and the NBA abruptly suspended play when Rudy Gobert tested positive for the coronavirus.

Yet at the spring home of the Pittsburgh Pirates in Bradenton, Fla., the National League hosts and the Toronto Blue Jays remained on track for a 1:07 p.m. first pitch, business as usual. As a crowd of 5,275 filtered in, none of it made sense to Biggio. “I was confused about why we were playing that one spring training game when every other sport was down,” he says.

Bo Bichette felt similarly and is even more blunt. “I’m not going to sit here and lie and say that anyone wanted to be at that game after seeing the NBA (shut down) – we all knew it was coming,” he says. “We went out there and did our job, but I think around the fifth inning we got word that the season had shut down and they made us finish the game. I remember we were all complaining about that.”

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The Blue Jays beat the Pirates 7-5 that day – Bichette hit a home run and Biggio had a base hit – just before Major League Baseball chaotically disbanded into the collective uncertainty of pandemic life. Twelve months later, after another round of owner-driven labour strife with players, a shortened 60-game season and an off-kilter winter, another spring training is well into the churn, the first steps toward a normal 162-game grind.

Along the way, terms like intake screening, social distancing, PCR testing and contact tracing became as much a part of the baseball lexicon as launch angle, exit velocity and spin rates. Masks became as indispensable as batting gloves, hand sanitizer as commonplace as pine tar, neck gaiters a stylish new diamond accessory. A 108-page operations manual, down five pages from the original version last year, is essentially Major League Baseball’s new bible.

“Coming back this year, it’s almost like, I won’t say it became normal, but it’s like, all right, the saliva testing we do, the distancing, the spreading out our schedule for the contact tracing in case somebody does get it we’re not all together, it’s become second nature now,” says veteran infielder Joe Panik. “At this point, we’ve become comfortable with where we’re at as a league.”

The adaptations remain necessary this spring despite growing hope that the pandemic’s end is near. Even as U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday announced that he would order states to make all adults eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations by May 1 and targeted a July 4 return to normalcy, Canadian star Joey Votto’s revelation this week that he’d contracted the virus was a reminder of the ongoing risk and that vigilance is essential.

Since an outbreak at the club’s spring home in Dunedin, Fla., last June, the Blue Jays have managed to avoid infections once players and staff have cleared the intake process. Outfielder Jonathan Davis’ arrival at summer camp last year was delayed when he tested positive in his home of Hattiesburg, Miss. He’d heard of someone locally who had COVID but didn’t know and decided to get himself tested when his nose started running, his only symptom.

“That is all I thought it was, at least,” says Davis. “I just kind of went through the protocols after that and it was all good. … Last year was just very uncertain as far as what would happen and when it would happen. This year we have a few knowns, which is good to have.”

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The impact of COVID-19 variants of concern remains one collective unknown and is tied, to a large extent, to the Blue Jays’ lingering uncertainty over where they will play out their 2021 home schedule. Prevented from hosting games at Rogers Centre due to pandemic border restrictions, they settled at triple-A Buffalo’s Sahlen Park as a refuge last summer, and this year will play at least their first two homestands at Dunedin’s TD Ballpark.

Under the lax rules on public gatherings in Florida, the Blue Jays are playing at up to 15 per cent capacity this spring, and will sell the same amount of tickets for home games during the regular season. Their second road series of the campaign, at the Texas Rangers, will be sold at 100 per cent capacity after the state government there announced a full reopening.

“I had assumed it,” Ross Stripling, who lives in Houston, said after pitching before a crowd of about 1,000 fans this week at Sarasota’s Ed Smith Stadium. “I could feel the adrenaline. I can’t imagine a full stadium in a month. That’s going to be wild.”

The Blue Jays’ season might be, too, with their home fluid beyond May 2.

A couple more homestands in Dunedin is one possibility, but the club wants no part of the area’s searing heat and daily thunderstorms during summer. A return to Buffalo is on the table, although that would also require relocating the triple-A Bisons. The club’s enduring hope is that vaccinations accelerate enough to contain a third wave driven by the variants of concern in Canada and allow for a return to Toronto, even to play at an empty stadium.

Panik, a free agent this winter, re-signed with the Blue Jays despite the club’s vagabond status.

“It was knowing, OK, if it’s Buffalo, great,” he said of his decision-making process. “We enjoyed our time in Buffalo. The organization did a great job of fixing up that place and making it basically a second home for us. Obviously, I would absolutely love to come back to Toronto and play there. I only got a little taste of it playing against the Blue Jays with the Giants, so I would love to play in Toronto. But what we dealt with last year, it brought the team together in, I don’t know if it’s a weird way, but like a bonding way. We’re the only organization that has to go through the changing of cities, not knowing what’s going on.

“For me and my wife, this year was like, if it’s Dunedin, it’s Dunedin. If it’s Buffalo, it’s Buffalo. If it’s Toronto, fantastic. We were comfortable with, basically, the chaos that’s about to happen. Whether it’s Dunedin for a month, Buffalo, Toronto, we’re ready for it.”

The same goes for the daily grind amid COVID-19.

Reliever Kirby Yates, then with the San Diego Padres, remembers asking himself, “What is this?” a year ago as camps shut down. He was immediately concerned about keeping his family safe and wondering when baseball would be safe to resume.

Once it did, “I was pretty comfortable. I feel like we’re safe here. We’re safer here than we would be anywhere else, honestly,” he says. “I mean, we’re getting tested every other day and you know who you’re around and stuff like that. I don’t think at any point in the last year or so while we were doing this have I felt unsafe.”

Starter Robbie Ray has even found things to like about the new protocols.

“There’s really no busywork,” he says. “It’s like you get in, do your stuff and you get out. For me, it’s great. I do my work, I go home and I get to be with my three kids and my wife. It’s almost better that way. Obviously, not getting to see the games at home is tough, but understanding that we’re in season, that’s going to be fine.”

Through March 11, Major League Baseball has conducted 49,281 tests and returned 27 positives (21 players and six staff members) across 17 clubs since the beginning of intake testing. That includes Votto’s positive this week, and as the variants of concern steadily become the dominant strains in the community, discipline to the protocols will remain a competitive advantage.

“Regardless of the situation we know we have to be careful with the coronavirus,” says Biggio. “We’ve seen it in the NBA and NFL, especially with contact tracing and really important players not being able to play in games. We understand it’s something we have to continue living with, and the biggest thing is staying on the field.”

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