Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports
The plans that have leaked out about possible ways to start the Major League Baseball season belong in garbage cans, according to Bruce Jenkins.
Because they are “complete junk.”
Baseball is putting every idea on the table in search for a route that would allow the game to be played — and money to be made — during the coronavirus pandemic that has claimed more than 22,000 American lives.
Quarantining all teams in Arizona, with the players’ lives boiled down to hotels for sleep, mostly spring training parks to play and then back to hotels, has been discussed. As has reorganizing the leagues by spring locales, meaning half the league would play in Florida and the divisions would be ripped up.
The Giants and Dodgers would be split, and the A’s would be in San Francisco’s division, which “was the only reason to look at the latest plan,” Jenkins said.
“Everything that has come out is complete junk for me,” said the Chronicle columnist on KNBR’s “Murph & Mac” on Monday. “I can’t really get into: Who’s in what division? Does the top seed get a bye? Wait, no, the top seed plays a lower seed? … It’s all junk, Murph. We don’t have any light. There’s no light that we can forecast here — ‘OK, this is going to be OK in a month.’ Things are just going to be darker.”
While the NBA has seemed to quietly accept its season is over, baseball wants to begin its own with so much money at stake. The game does lend itself most to social-distancing guidelines, but it still would require roughly 30 players and perhaps 10 coaches per team and untold numbers of umpires, field assistants, clubhouse employees, chefs, etc. to play. That’s a lot of people who would need to be in one locale while the world is being told to stay at home.
There are estimates that bringing baseball solely to Arizona would include 5,000 people.
“Nothing could go wrong there, right?” Jenkins said. “Even if it’s 2,000 people.
“You have people dying now before they even get tested. All of a sudden, we’re going to test people twice a day — what about the rest of the country? How do they feel about that? For that matter, how does the state of Arizona or Florida feel about it?
“It’s just total junk. 100 percent awful.”
