Mike Trout walked through empty stands before practice at Angels Stadium on July 4.
Photo: Ashley Landis/Associated PressSaying that winning baseball teams need clubhouse leadership is a trope so tired that it’s become a cliché. But in this pandemic-shortened season, where one bad choice could spark an outbreak of the novel coronavirus across the sport, it’s never been more true.
Major League Baseball’s 2020 operations manual controls virtually every aspect of players’ lives at the ballpark. None of it matters, however, without 100% compliance in an area the document doesn’t regulate: what happens when the players aren’t at work.
With the health of thousands of people in the industry and billions of dollars at stake, all that’s standing in the way of a disastrous outcome is a demographic group not known for discipline, sound judgment and risk aversion: young men. A player choosing to visit a bar, go grocery shopping without a mask or fire up Tinder on the road could set off a chain reaction of infections and lead to the entire season crumbling down.
So baseball’s veterans are preparing to do what they’ve always done: keep the rookies in line.
“It’s three months that you’ve got to do this,” Texas Rangers third baseman Todd Frazier said. “I think we can handle it. People have done stuff like this a lot longer than we have. This is for everybody, so let’s show everybody how it’s supposed to be done.”
That’s the message the 34-year-old Frazier delivered to his teammates in a Zoom meeting last week, as players around the sport gathered to resume training camp. If this experiment is going to succeed, it’s the message all veteran leaders will have to deliver, all season long, to emphasize the importance of making smart decisions every second of every day, no exceptions.
The league won’t formally restrict players’ activities away from the stadium. Instead, the operations manual offers an ominous warning: “The careless actions of a single individual places the entire team [and their families] at risk.” Unlike the NBA, which is sequestering personnel at the Walt Disney World campus in Florida, baseball teams will play in home stadiums and travel from city to city. That increases the possibility of somebody going somewhere insecure.
Rangers players, from left to right, Ronald Guzman, Rougned Odor, Elvis Andrus and Todd Frazier, share a laugh during spring training.
Photo: Charlie Riedel/Associated PressBaseball faces several challenges in actually executing all of this. The first is that some veteran leaders might wind up not playing at all. Several players in their mid-30s have said that they wouldn’t participate in the season over concerns related to Covid-19, including David Price of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Ryan Zimmerman of the Washington Nationals and Félix Hernández of the Atlanta Braves.
The opt-outs could continue before opening day, especially if the problems from this past weekend continue. MLB’s workplace protocols got off to a rocky start, with the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros both canceling their workouts Monday because they hadn’t received the results of coronavirus tests from Friday. Several other teams reported delays as well. The turnaround is supposed to be 24 hours.
In a statement Monday, Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo called upon MLB to “work quickly to resolve issues with their process and their lab.” Otherwise, he said, the rest of training camp and the 2020 season “are at risk.”
MLB acknowledged the problems Monday afternoon in a statement that appeared to attribute the delays to difficulties shipping test samples over a holiday weekend to the lab in Salt Lake City that runs its performance-enhancing drug program, and which is serving now as its coronavirus testing center. The league said that it had addressed the delays and “do not expect a recurrence.”
All of this comes days after Los Angeles Angels outfielder Mike Trout, the best player in the sport, expressed discomfort about playing because he and his wife are expecting their first child later this summer.
“It’s going to take a group effort, and one guy can mess this up,” Trout told reporters.
For Frazier, hammering that point home is personal. His grandmother, Palma Frazier, died in April after contracting Covid-19. When he spoke to his teammates, he explained what he had experienced while locked down with his family in New Jersey and implored them not to “do anything crazy,” even when nobody’s watching.
“I wanted to explain, ‘Listen, not only is this year the most unprecedented year you’re going to have, but you’ve got to think about others as well,’” Frazier said.
Many players haven’t been affected by the coronavirus in their own lives. American baseball players tend to hail from smaller, politically conservative communities that were largely spared by the initial brunt of the pandemic.
Baseball players are also of an age group—20s and early 30s—that is less likely to become seriously ill when infected by the virus. Managers, coaches and umpires are in greater danger.
Already, players and officials from several teams say they’ve had frank conversations with teammates who were discovered to have partaken in risky behavior that could carry grave consequences nonetheless.
“We’ve had to have a few of those, unfortunately,” Rangers manager Chris Woodward said. “We’ve done it all to get guys to understand that going out is not an option right now.”
For younger players, making potentially dangerous choices is literally in their nature.
Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University who specializes in decision-making and risk-taking, said that the period between the ages of 17 and 23 “is the single most risky period in human development.”
According to Stats LLC, 124 players who were in their age-23 season or younger appeared in a major-league game last year.
“I can see when they’re on the road and staying in a common hotel, an older player hearing a party going on down the hall and going, ‘Hey, cut it out, we’re not supposed to do that stuff,’” Steinberg said. “But what about when they’re living in their own houses? Once they’re at the bar, all bets are off.”
Some in the baseball community have tried to educate others about the disease. Erin Woodward, a trauma nurse who is married to the Rangers’ manager, wrote a nearly 4,500 word document she titled “SARS COV-2 explained,” and sent it to a few spouses and partners of players on the Rangers. The purpose, Erin Woodward said in an interview, was “to give people I care about a fighting chance to inoculate themselves against wrong information” about the virus.
The primer has since been passed around the league. For players who read it, “It was eye-opening,” Chris Woodward said.
“Even if you were to contract it and not have a single symptom, you’re going to be missing time away from baseball and jeopardizing the team in the win-loss column,” Nationals ace pitcher Max Scherzer said. “That might wake up people more than even the health reasons.”
Other teams plan to appeal to players’ ferocious competitive natures. Anybody who tests positive for Covid-19, whether or not they’re symptomatic, must isolate until they have two negative tests spaced 24 hours apart, complete an antibody test and potentially undergo a cardiac examination. Anyone who had come in contact with that player must also isolate until testing negative.
Dodgers pitcher David Price won’t play this season because of concerns over the coronavirus pandemic.
Photo: Ross D. Franklin/Associated PressWith the season consisting of only 60 games, two weeks away would mean missing more than 20% of the schedule. Multiple players being out for that long would severely hinder a team’s chances of competing for a championship.
“They see this as an opportunity and a challenge for us to be better than every other team,” Cleveland Indians president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti said. “To the extent we can do a better job of keeping ourselves healthy and not getting each other sick, the better chance we have to win more games.”
Players say that no amount of rules or admonitions mean much without buy-in from the players themselves. Leadership will be required to create a culture of accountability.
It won’t be easy.
“It’s not going to be the most fun, but the guys are going to stick to it,” New York Mets infielder Jeff McNeil said. “We all want to play baseball.”
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—Louise Radnofsky contributed to this article.
Write to Jared Diamond at jared.diamond@wsj.com
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