Gov. Doug Ducey is supportive of Major League Baseball playing a modified season in Arizona.
MLB officials and the players union have been in talks to revive what’s left of a 2020 season, which should have started last month but was postponed by the COVID-19 outbreak. One idea that came to the forefront was playing all games in the dozen-plus major league-caliber fields scattered about the valley.
Ducey answered a question about the prospect Wednesday evening.
“I have had discussions with the commissioner of Major League Baseball,” he said. “While I want to hold the content of those discussions in confidence, I just want everyone to know that Arizona, at the right time, is very open-minded to hosting whatever Major League Baseball would like from the state at the time it would be appropriate for public health if Arizona were in a position to reopen.
“We have the facilities that are here,” Ducey continued. “We have the hotel space that is here. We’re going to want to make certain that the metrics and the data are proper before we were to go forward, but I think the two words that would allow the country and the state of Arizona to know that things were headed back to normal would be ‘play ball.’”
Arizona hosts 15 teams for Spring Training annually, a considerable boon to the local economy. Spring training was shut down early this year as the virus began requiring states to take action.
To weather Arizona’s harsh summer, sources told ESPN that teams would have expanded rosters, play shortened games, and ban practices such as pitching mound visits to speed up play. One of the major hurdles would be to keep players and others from contracting COVID-19 during the season and potentially spreading it. To combat this, sources say the players would be essentially quarantined throughout the shortened season, kept in hotels and spread throughout the empty stadiums they’re playing in to maintain proper distancing.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and member of President Donald Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force, was asked about the premise Tuesday in an interview with Peter Hamby of Good Luck America.
“There’s a way of doing that,” he said. “Nobody comes to the stadium. Put them in big hotels wherever you want to play. Keep them very well surveilled but have them tested every week to make sure they don’t wind up infecting each other or their family and just let them play the season out. … I think you’d get enough buy-in from people who are dying to see a baseball game.”
