In March 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak emptied spring training stadiums and brought the sports world to a halt. (File photo by John Cascella/Cronkite News)
MESA – The skies over Phoenix were heavy and dark, an unusual sight in a city bathed in more than 300 days of sunshine each year. A storm was rolling through the desert on March 12, 2020, a fitting omen for what was coming.
Major League Baseball was in full spring training mode, with teams and players shaking off the offseason rust for the league’s 120th season of the modern era. But beyond the outfields and dugouts, an even greater storm loomed – one that would soon halt the season before it even began.
Everywhere beyond those outfield walls, normalcy was slipping away. The COVID-19 pandemic had begun its relentless march, forcing businesses to shutter and paralyzing entire cities. The world was heading inside.
The NBA had shut down the night before, and now baseball —America’s game, the sport that had endured world wars and national tragedies — faced the same fate. By the next morning, MLB pulled the plug. Spring training abruptly ended. The season, for the first time in more than a century, was on hold.
“The day before, the NBA had just shut down,” Athletics reliever Tyler Ferguson said. “We talked about it in the clubhouse, whether we thought it was going to shut down or not, and then everything happened.”
With players sent home, they had to lie in wait as the world tried to figure out how to move forward in a new, socially distanced reality. It was a chaotic and increasingly isolating time. The phrase “social distance” rose to national prominence, weighing heavily on in-person interaction.
In the months following the mass shutdowns, debate grew over whether sports should continue. During World War II, when nearly every able-bodied man was expected to serve overseas, officials decided that sports should go on to boost national morale. While the world wasn’t at war, it faced another global crisis — one that made sports feel just as necessary under the right conditions.
There was considerable discourse to resume play in the negotiations between the MLB and the MLBPA around the conditions of the return to play. Under Paragraph 11 of the CBA at the time was the “national emergency” clause. By March 13, President Donald Trump had issued this exact order, which essentially gave the league and the teams the ability to suspend pay to the players for any games not played during a declared national emergency.
Structuring a deal to return to playing in a shortened season was extremely important as the players’ livelihoods were at risk if they were not playing under the world conditions at the time. They waited five months for a conceivable and agreed-upon plan forward to safely continue their line of employment and source of income.
Looking back on the chaotic days before baseball shut down in March 2020, Athletics reliever Tyler Ferguson remembers the uncertainty that gripped spring training clubhouses. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
In the meantime, staying sharp became paramount. The burden of physical training the world’s best athletes – traditionally one that highly-trained physical training professionals carried – often fell to the only people the players were still allowed to be around in their homes.
“My wife got really good at playing catch with me,” said Ferguson, who also went back to finish his degree online from Vanderbilt University during this period. “We built up her arm strength, and she got good at it.”
Baseball returned for an abbreviated 60-game season on July 23, 2020, a fraction of the usual 162. Precautions were taken. Almost everyone in the league’s ecosystem saw their role shift, however slightly, with an eye toward player safety and preventing the spread of disease. Even the baseballs themselves were subject to increased safety measures.
No job was too small in the fight to keep the season alive. Even the most unsung roles, like A’s bullpen catcher Dustin Hughes, took on added weight, his responsibilities expanding beyond catching warm-up pitches to helping safeguard the health of those around him.
“(I remember) the amount of baseballs we went through,” Hughes said. “You couldn’t touch the balls. Once the ball was touched, it was unusable for a certain amount of hours, until it was sanitized and ready to go back out. It was crazy.”
Five years ago (1,828 days to be exact), fans have long since returned to spring training stadiums, not adorning face masks that became an integral and controversial part of daily fashion for much of 2020 and 2021. While it’s been over 1,800 days since the players were sentenced to quarantine and the world snapped its shutters closed, for some, it’s a time that stays on short recall.
“Five years,” Hughes said. “It’s gone by pretty quick.”
For others, that dark stormy day in Phoenix and the gloomy years that followed seem a world away, a period an entirely different person experienced. A closed-off Earth barely of belief, seemingly an entire lifetime ago.
“I’m 31, was 27 then,” Ferguson said. “A lot of life has happened, a lot of growing up happened in those five years. So it does feel like a long time ago.”