Usually, these days are sleepy, routine formalities, equivalent to adults returning to school after a long summer vacation. The players flow into Port St. Lucie on the east coast of Florida, and on to Tampa on the west, they showed off their new ride, they reunited with old teammates, introduced themselves to new ones.
One of the early advantages of spring training was the manager’s parting speech. All of this is always composed of the same text, of course, the Cactus League or the Grapefruit League, in places that sound like spring: Bradenton and Lakeland, Sarasota and Surprise, Goodyear and Glendale.
This is always the business of Stengel-meet-Saban, Leyland-meet-Leahy: managers as football coaches, deliver their message in front of a group of passionate soccer players, all eager to sweat for the first time.
It all consisted of a spring training rug – each team, every year, would return not only a century but to the previous one, rituals and rituals as much as part of the sports calendar as anything and unique in one respect: no scoreboard installed, no winners, no losers. Only the arrival of annual baseball, in winter, always feels like a victory, for everyone.
Yankee StadiumAnthony J. Causi
We have a little idea of what jumbled training Spring 2.0 is, because we all learn that quickly, every day, every hour. This time, the players arrived with masks covering their faces, and their greetings were far different, because the tenor of each conversation was different now.
Nothing resembled the physical assembly lines they passed in the spring, an examination that was 99 percent of the time showed nothing out of the ordinary; now they have tests, saliva and blood work, and their sport wrestles with what would be considered collateral damage – 5 percent positive test for corona virus? 15? 20? – and what number is considered too high to continue?
Manager? They will be more Fauci than Rockne, delivering their message in a wave of careful social responsibility, two and three and four of them, as many times as needed, when the baseball team thinks of complicated mathematics that allows 50 to 60 players to prepare for the baseball season appropriately . on a single diamond when there are usually six and seven in easy access.
And no one waits for good summer sweat, not when we are still taught what each of these drops might say.
We are all making this up right now, even when sport follows the rules and protocols listed in the book that feel longer than “The Power Broker.”
“I know this will be a challenge,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said on Wednesday, his first public comment since he and other club members were forced to leave Tampa almost four months ago and await the first wave of danger.
“Things will happen every day that will make it more challenging than usual. Our job is to get ready, try to sort things out, make a joint plan, how we want to attack the buildup for three weeks this season.”
Boone’s words echoed Mets GM Brodie Van Wagenen a few days ago, when he talked about the strange duality of focusing on the work he was working while also understanding it had become, at least for now, a very different job description.
“We are trying to lay the groundwork for winning the championship,” Boone said. “My job, my focus for the next few days is to lay that foundation and get our people in the best position to be successful.”
There is, no doubt, a little comfort in hearing words like this, reminding that if everything goes well there will be a baseball game that counts in a few weeks, an opportunity to debate changes in pitching and formation again – even if the discussion will come through Zoom or cellphone, rather than around a water cooler or in a faucet room.
But there is also “Jaw” music that plays quietly in the background too. This is part of our daily soundtrack now, every time we refresh our news feed and see figures from distant regions painting graffiti in all our best wishes. And it will be like the results of spring 2.0 training: daily training, daily checks, looking to see who played that day and who didn’t, filtering out the hard data, wondering if it won’t reach July 23, wondering how deep from that it might continue unchecked.
“The reason we’re here,” Boone the captain said, “hasn’t changed.”
But Boone’s father of four, Boone who survived heart surgery, he certainly knew that the situation was definitely there.
