MLB plans for spring, season to start on time. Texas Rangers among those with doubts.
Pitchers and catchers are scheduled to report to Texas Rangers spring training Feb. 17, which will feel like it has arrived much quicker than the four-plus weeks still to go.
There’s much still to do, like continuing to prepare for the upcoming season while also making sure housing arrangements and transportation are all lined up. Time can get away from a ballplayer.
In the times we’re all living through, the coronavirus pandemic, there’s a chance all those plans and all that training is put on hold.
So far, though, and especially in recent days, word from the MLB commissioner’s office is that spring training and the 162-game regular season will start without delay. Guidelines have been put in place that would allow fans to attend spring games in Arizona and Florida.
Great, but not many with the Rangers, and elsewhere across the game, actually believe what commissioner Rob Manfred is saying will happen.
The Rangers’ believe-it-when-they-see-it approach stems from a practical matter — the pandemic is still going strong. Sure, people are being vaccinated, but not ballplayers and club officials who are going to be lumped together for six weeks at spring training and six months for the season.
In a memo to teams earlier this week, Manfred did acknowledge that COVID-19 and orders from local governments could alter everything he laid out.
But baseball did, for the most part, successfully navigate the 60-game season in 2020 with only a few teams dealing with COVID-19 outbreaks.
Players were tested daily. Strict protocols were put in place for road teams, and players were held to an honor code to do the right things at home.
The playoffs went off without a hitch, at Globe Life Field and at a bubble hotel, until the seventh inning of the final game of the World Series.
Players will be vaccinated eventually. So will fans. Owners will make money. It won’t be pre-pandemic money, but any money is better than the zero that teams made in ticket revenue in 2020.
And it’s all going to go off on time, so says the commissioner but with some asterisks in place.
Don’t hold it against teams and players who will believe it when they see it.
