(Dubious) Report: Spring Training Could Resume June 10, Regular Season July 1
I’ll begin this post as I have all the others about plans to restart the baseball season, with a caveat about salt, but hope is still hope and Trevor Plouffe provided some in very specific fashion Monday afternoon. The former Twins third baseman is now part of the Talkin’ Baseball podcast, an offshoot of the ever-growing Jomboy Media empire, so he’s not just any geek off the street. While that doesn’t mean his report is ironclad by any stretch, it’s worth taking note of.
Want some good baseball news??
I just heard from multiple sources that on June 10th, Spring Training 2 will start. July 1st will be Opening Day and all teams will be playing at their home ballparks.
We’ll be discussing it in full on the next @TalkinBaseball_
— Coach Trev (@trevorplouffe) May 4, 2020
Citing multiple sources, Plouffe claimed that spring training will start back up on June 10 with the regular season getting underway on July 1. Regardless of who’s saying it, there’s a lot about this that holds water. States are starting to open back up in general and that figures to be even more the case in another 5-6 weeks. The July 1 date has pretty much been the hypothetical target from the start and would afford roughly 3 weeks of ramp-up, so that fits.
That said, there’s still plenty of reason to maintain some very healthy skepticism about this report. First, no one else of note seems to be corroborating it. And you know damn well Jeff Passan, Ken Rosenthal, Jon Heyman, et al. would be jumping at the chance to tweet that they had confirmed the news had they heard the same thing.
I’m not saying the lack of additional reporting in and of itself makes this information dubious, but it’s a pretty big scoop that seems to be something the really plugged-in national guys would have as well. There’s also the matter of the specificity, which is a little premature given the state of this whole pandemic reaction. How can anyone say with any certainty when baseball can resume if we hardly even know the very basics about so many states and cities in which teams are supposed to play.
That brings us to the part about teams actually opening in their home ballparks, easily the least believable part of the whole deal. I’m not even saying that necessarily makes it untrue, only that the notion of playing across 30 different locations by July 1 seems like a logistical impossibility at this point. A more reasonable option, at least based on what we have heard to this point, is starting out in more controlled hubs for a few weeks at the start of the season.
This reads to me very much like the Lookout Landing report that the minor league season had been canceled, something that ended up not being true in spite of information from multiple sources. While the minors are in dire straights and could very well end up being shut down for 2020, it seemed as though a few people had either misinterpreted speculation or simply got a little overzealous in repeating what they heard, thus turning it into a real-life game of Telephone.
If I were a betting man, I’d put money on the same thing being true in this case. Like maybe these are the dates MLB would like to pencil in, with home ballparks as the most ideal scenario in the even that everything is perfect between now and July 1. What I’m saying is that I don’t doubt Plouffe heard what he says he heard, I just think a lot of the veracity may have come out in the wash.
But hey, I’m all for finding ways to spur a few good vibes here.
Hey, didn’t take long to get this one shot down.
https://twitter.com/keithlaw/status/1257444114687197185?s=20