Major League Baseball considering starting the season at spring training sites because of you-know-what

That’s actually only one option being considered. Another is to move the home games of teams in heavily affected cities, in which case the Seattle Mariners could be spending a lot of time away from home.

(I’ve criticized the panic, as you know, but I think simply disbanding the Seattle Mariners as a way of fighting coronavirus might be a worthy sacrifice.)

Another idea is to have at-risk teams play in other teams’ home stadiums, provided they’re available.

But it seems the most plausible option if baseball is determined to make some sort of move is to simply keep teams in their spring training homes. They’re already there, after all, and the staff and facilities are used to hosting major league games even if the venues are much smaller. The teams have their own clubhouses at each site, their own equipment and their own offices.

It’s nowhere near as good as simply starting the season in the normal host cities in the regular ballparks, but it sounds like baseball is concerned it may have limited options:

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Ultimately, baseball realizes it might have no choice in the matter, as local governments begin to assert their authority. MLB hopes to treat each team’s situation individually and make determinations about how to proceed on a case-by-case basis, the people familiar with the matter said.

Santa Clara County in California has banned public gatherings of a certain size, leaving the San Jose Sharks with the reality of perhaps playing hockey games behind closed doors later this month. On Tuesday, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine recommended that teams in his state bar spectators for indoor games, though at this point the Cincinnati Reds and Cleveland Indians have no plans to change anything.

Those kinds of decrees could expand. Complicating things further is that roughly 80% of MLB stadiums are owned by governmental agencies, leaving baseball at their mercy if local health authorities intervene.

I am convinced that these measures wouldn’t reduce the number of coronavirus cases by even one. Until you can stop all people from interacting with all other people, the thing is going to spread – until we have a vaccine or it peters out on its own as people’s immune systems learn to fight it off.

And there are problems with the plan of playing at spring training sites. One is that every one of those sites is also the home ballpark of a minor league affiliate, and all those teams have home dates that start the same week as the major league schedule. You’d have built-in conflicts everywhere, which might push the minor league games to the back fields at the teams’ spring training complexes.

Travel would also be an issue. In spring training, you have 15 teams who train in Florida and 15 who train in Arizona. There are no road trips between the two states. Florida teams play other Florida teams and Arizona teams do likewise. This plan would require a lot of air travel between the two states, so the logistics of playing the season this way would be a lot more complicated than they are in spring training.

(By the way, the crowds in Florida and Arizona are going to skew older than those in the home cities, and older people are at higher risk of death from the virus, so how does that make any sense?)

At least this isn’t as bad an idea as playing games in empty stadiums. We saw in 2015, when the Orioles had to host the White Sox in a game with no fans because of riots in Baltimore, what a depressing and deflating experience that is. I just got my Tiger season passes yesterday – coincidentally the same day we learned Michigan has its first two coronavirus cases, which are both in the Detroit area. I have no intention of letting this virus panic stop me from going to games, and I imagine most people feel the same way.

I suspect MLB is considering these contingencies not because they think it will really make a difference in halting the virus, but because it wants to fend off criticism of being cavalier in the face of a panic. Maybe baseball is better off – indeed, maybe we’re all better off – if someone defies the panic and takes a stand for life as usual.