The Twins relief pitcher remembers his teammates, shortly after being told to pack up and go home, predicting when they once again would get to play the game they all loved. Some said two weeks. Some said not until 2021.
He remembers sitting his Denver-area home, all alone, days after returning from spring training with absolutely nothing to do. It was a Monday in March, the first real time in more than a decade that he had spent at home that time of year.
At one point, he was so bored that he color-coded his closet.
One year ago Friday, following the lead of the NBA, NHL and other sports leagues, Major League Baseball came to an abrupt halt. COVID-19 had started spreading across the country, bringing death, devastation and economic destruction with it. In the period that has followed, more than 29 million Americans have been sickened and more than 530,000 have died from the virus.
The Twins, in every step of the process — both before MLB made the decision to shut down and after — made a series of challenging decisions on the fly with conviction, doing the best they could with the limited information they had at the time. In all decisions, prioritizing the health and safety of players and staff came above all else.
“(We) were dealt a hand we’ve never seen before, and I think that our baseball leadership, our manager, our players, all dealt with it the best they possibly could,” team president and CEO Dave St. Peter said. “And I think organizationally the thing I’m probably most proud of is I think at the end of 2020, I think our organization was closer-knit, closer-bound together than we were at the beginning.”
The days prior
Twins president of baseball operations Derek Falvey remembers the gentle chiding. In the days before COVID-19 flipped the baseball world on its side, Falvey had been closely monitoring the situation on CNN, keeping up with the latest news.
“These guys in the office, (assistant general manager) Jeremy Zoll in particular, I remember kind of joking with me, making fun of me, was like, ‘What’s your new coronavirus update?’ ” Falvey said.
The first case of the novel coronavirus was identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. The first recorded positive case in the U.S. was registered in January. And on March 1, Florida, where the Twins were training for their upcoming 2020 season, recorded its first two positive cases of the virus.
Team medical director Dr. Chris Camp had been monitoring the situation. He remembers it being on his radar by the time spring training started in February, though he didn’t envision it taking off like it did.
On March 5, one day before the state of Minnesota registered its first positive case of the virus, Dr. Camp and Dr. Amy Beacom, another team doctor, addressed the team. There would be no more autographs, no grabbing a pen that might have been in a fan’s mouth. No more mingling with spectators. Phrases like “social distancing” had started to enter the daily lexicon.
To make it up to disappointed customers, Twins director of communications Dustin Morse got players to sign about 50 baseball cards each that could be distributed in a safe manner. They dubbed them “corona cards.”
“I just remember standing up and saying that we’re advising you not to shake hands and fist bump and take selfies and borrow peoples’ pens,” Morse said. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is the first sign we might not be in the safest place right now, a stadium with 10,000 people.’ ”
Around the same time, assistant trainer Masa Abe was returning to Florida from Japan after flying home for the birth of his child. The virus had been circulating more widely around Japan, and the Twins felt it was in the best interest to have Abe quarantine before rejoining the group.
The decision to limit fan interaction and have Abe quarantine seemed dramatic at the time, Camp said, though in retrospect, both decisions were correct.
“We aired on the side of being overly cautious and almost 100 percent of the time, two to three weeks later, we looked back and said, ‘Thank goodness we took the cautious approach,’ because things continued to sort of spiral out of control,” Camp said.
The preparation
Coronavirus concerns were in mind by the time the Twins left for their daylong trip to the Dominican Republic to play the Detroit Tigers in an exhibition game.
The Twins left on March 6 and during one of the last moments of normalcy, they mixed and mingled during a nighttime party with the Tigers at their hotel that night. They returned on March 7. The trip went off without a hitch.
Miguel Sano and Nelson Cruz delighted the crowd in their home country during a 7-6 victory in Santo Domingo. The former homered, the latter doubled; both went 2-for-3.
Falvey remembers being handed bottles of sanitizer “left and right” and thinking to himself “This is strange now. This is different.”
If only he had known then.
Upon their return, every day brought a new, significant development. On March 9, the league made the decision to lock everyone out of clubhouses other than players and essential team personnel. That included the media.
The Twins’ communications department set up distanced interviews on the field. For group scrums, the Twins set up a podium in a tunnel around the corner from the clubhouse, across from the batting cages. Rogers, the team’s MLB Players Association representative, did a lot of the talking for his teammates during that period of time, standing up and describing the fear of the unknown.
Back home, St. Peter had been in conversations with both the Oakland Athletics and Seattle Mariners regarding the Twins’ season-opening road trip. At the time, Washington state had become epicenter of the country’s outbreak. It had become increasingly unlikely that the Twins would be able to play in either location.
On March 11, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee had announced a restriction on gatherings of more than 250 people, and a day earlier, the Alameda County Public Health Department, which covers Oakland, had recommended postponing events of more than 1,000 people.
St. Peter said the Twins were in discussions about potentially moving the Oakland series to Las Vegas, where the Athletics have their Triple-A team, and the Seattle series to Peoria, Ariz., where the Mariners have their spring training complex.
Team travel director Mike Herman, anticipating a potential move, called his contact at The Phoenician, a resort in Scottsdale, Ariz., to check in on availability in case that did happen.
“We were already kind of, I would say, preparing for what was going to be a really unusual start to our season,” St. Peter said.
That fateful Wednesday night, the writing was on the wall. The World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a pandemic during the day. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, overseas in Australia, revealed their diagnosis, and the positive test heard ‘round the sports world — that of Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert — essentially sealed the fate of all sports leagues.
The NBA halted play indefinitely on Wednesday night, setting off a snowball effect that led to cancellations and postponements at an almost dizzying pace over the next couple of days.
“I think the clear big moment that I remember was the NBA shutting down but even prior to that, it felt like there was this momentum towards ‘This is going to be more of a problem than we’re currently anticipating,’” Falvey said.
Even with the sense of a shutdown coming, the Twins were supposed to host Baltimore that Thursday night at Hammond Stadium. It was the last remaining game on the schedule. Falvey remembers speaking with Orioles executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias and telling him he thought they should hold their bus up in Sarasota, where the Orioles train.
The two teams opted not to play and that day, MLB announced it would delay Opening Day by at least two weeks.
The evacuation
By Friday, MLB had decided to suspend spring training, effective immediately, allowing players the choice to return home, stay in their spring training city or travel to their team’s home city. The next morning, Falvey, Rogers and manager Rocco Baldelli met early in Baldelli’s office, and decided to send everyone home.
Rogers remembers it seeming like a radical move at the time as the Twins were one of the first teams, if not the first, to decide they were packing up and getting out of town. As he remembers it, his twin brother, Tyler Rogers, who plays for the Giants, didn’t leave camp for another few days.
“In my mind, there was a good chance we could fly home and then we could be coming back rather quickly and that was quickly erased a few days later,” Rogers said.
Falvey and Baldelli were resolute in the decision. Health and safety came first and baseball second. Following their early-morning meeting, with much of their baseball community spread out within the team’s clubhouse, some on the floor, some by their lockers, some standing up, that’s the message they delivered.
“It just felt like nothing stops our great game,” Morse said. “The coronavirus did and we had some difficult decisions but at the end of the day, Derek made a decision based on what he thought was best for our people. Baseball was secondary. He and Rocco. Rocco was also very supportive.”
The decision set off a chain of events that saw equipment manager Rod McCormick and his team pack up the clubhouse and everything in sight within a tight window of time and Herman set up shop as a travel agent.
“Mike Herman was on the computer like a madman getting everybody flights,” Rogers quipped. The meeting was in the middle of the morning on Saturday and by 4 p.m., Rogers was on a flight heading west toward Denver.
The Twins allowed each player to make their own decision — a handful stayed close by in Florida, around five or so went to Minnesota and most went home. At the time, no one knew whether restrictions would be placed on commercial travel, somewhat complicating individual decisions.
After four or five days of sticking around in Florida, Cruz decided it was time to leave and head back to the Dominican Republic, where he could safely train in his own gym.
“It was shocking, you know? Nothing that anyone had experienced in the past so even for myself, I didn’t know what to do, Cruz said. “I just started packing and thinking ‘Should I go to the Dominican? Should I stay here? What should I do next?’”
With support from the Pohlad family and St. Peter, Herman arranged a Delta charter flight that he said cost the team “over six figures,” to provide safe transport back to the Twin Cities. Nearly 70 people took the flight on Monday, as well as eight or nine four-legged companions, Herman said. It was mostly dogs, including Bowie, Baldelli’s Beauceron, and Binger, Marwin Gonzalez’s French Bulldog, though Trevor May’s cat did make the journey.
“I like to say it was Noah’s Ark going up to Minneapolis,” Herman said.
While Herman was busy trying to get near 150 people home, McCormick and his team were trying to figure out what to do with everyone’s equipment. At the time, nobody knew if they’d be back in Florida or if the next time they reconvened as a group it would be in Minnesota.
Eventually, the decision was made to send most everything back to Minnesota. After McCormick and co. got everything prepped and ready to go, Victor Gonzalez, the team’s Florida operations manager and other staff members, helped load the truck.
The aftermath
One year later, some semblances of normalcy are starting to return. On Friday, the Twins announced fans will be able to enjoy games at Target Field for the first time in more than in a year come April 8.
The 60-game 2020 season, one which at times many thought might never be played, was testing and trying. Players and staff, as they are doing once again this year, were subject to strict health and safety protocols. Away from the park, players were highly limited in what they were allowed to do. On road trips, they were more or less sequestered in their hotel rooms.
Twins pitcher Devin Smeltzer admitted he was “miserable,” with no fans in the crowd. New Twins shortstop Andrelton Simmons, then with the Los Angeles Angels, opted out of the final days of the season and later opened up to the Orange County Register about his depression and suicidal thoughts, stemming in part from the devastation wrought by the virus with an escalating death toll and millions of people losing their livelihoods.
“I think what we’ve tried to be attentive to throughout but I don’t know that we understood it in the moments, the immediacy of breaking camp was how much toll this pandemic really and the uncertainty that it brings and the tragedy that it brings, how it weighs on peoples’ minds,” St. Peter said. “I think the mental health challenges that we saw throughout 2020 really started back in spring training in those days before we broke camp.”
The Twins tried to provide as much support as possible in the mental health space, and still are, to this day.
Baseball players, as is often said, are regimented creatures of habit. And with so much up in the air at all times last year, the unprecedented season provided both physical and mental tests, Baldelli said, as players had to adapt on the fly.
As the Twins prepare to enter into their second affected by COVID-19, millions of people are getting vaccinated by the day, case numbers and deaths are dropping and the country is in various stages of reopening. A year later, the Twins, proud of how they handled the situation behind them, feel much more ready to tackle what’s in front of them.
“Last year has certainly prepared us so much better for this year. I think everyone in our group appears really ready to go in a lot of ways and truthfully, I think the anxiety level is down,” Baldelli said. “It doesn’t mean we’re not diligent and know what’s important and what we have to do on a daily basis, but the stresses of the unknown are not anything close to what they were last year when we were going through.”
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A year later, Twins look back at the week baseball shut down - Grand Forks Herald
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