The Boston Red Sox Monday, April 20, 2020

* MassLive.com

Coronavirus in MLB: Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw doesn’t think quarantined baseball is realistic (report)

Matt Vautour

Clayton Kershaw is still hopeful about playing baseball in 2020, but the Dodgers ace isn’t on board with the idea of quarantining everyone in Arizona and/or Florida.

Kershaw likely spoke for quite a few Major League Baseball players when he told the Los Angeles Times that he wasn’t willing to be away from his wife and children for that long, especially during this pandemic.

“We all want to play baseball. I get that; I want to play baseball too,” said Kershaw 32 in the article that posted Sunday. “But there is something about being in the big leagues and you can’t compromise that. Playing in spring training stadiums and quarantining for months without your family and certain things like that, I don’t think that’s doable if you’re talking about doing it for four to five months.”

Kershaw has a 5-year-old daughter Cali and two sons, Charley 3 and Cooper 3 months.

Among the solutions proposed to start play during the coronavirus pandemic was bringing all 30 Major League Baseball teams to Arizona where they’d play mostly in Spring Training stadiums with no fans, while being isolated from the rest of the world.

Coronavirus: MLB will allow teams to furlough, reduce pay of non-playing employees (report)

Chris Mason

Pay cuts may be coming to baseball soon.

According to The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, commissioner Rob Manfred will allow teams to furlough or reduce pay of non-playing personnel on Monday. Though the ballplayers aren’t affected, managers, coaches and front office members could be. It’s not mandatory, so it remains to be seen how the Red Sox will respond.

“Teams would not be required to take such measures, but baseball’s decision would provide the possibility of relief for clubs facing the most significant financial duress as the 2020 season remains on hold,” Rosenthal writes.

While player salaries have yet to be affected, they certainly could be. On Friday the NBA announced a plan to cut athletes’ paychecks by 25% beginning May 15.

It’s unclear when professional sports will return, but Dr. Anthony Fauci offered some optimism that they could be back this summer.

“There’s a way of doing that,” Dr. Fauci told Peter Hamby of Snapchat’s Good Luck America last week. “Put them in big hotels wherever you want to play. Keep them very well surveilled and name me a surveillance. But have them tested, like every week and make sure they don’t wind up infecting each other or their family. And just let them play the season out. People say, 'Well, you can’t play without spectators. Well, I think you’d probably get enough buy-in from people who are dying to see a baseball game, particularly me. I’m living in Washington. We have the world champion Washington Nationals. I want to see them play again."

MLB has been eyeing a restart in Arizona under similar fan-less guidelines.

* RedSox.com

Celebrate Patriots' Day Monday on MLB Network

Ian Browne

BOSTON -- Monday is Patriots' Day in Massachusetts, but there will be something missing besides the Boston Marathon. The Red Sox have always taken part in that tradition-rich holiday by playing an 11 a.m. game at Fenway Park.

Though that isn’t possible this year, MLB Network is featuring the Red Sox for its entire day of programming on Monday.

For early risers, Game 4 of the 2004 World Series will start at 7:30 a.m. ET, allowing viewers to relive that magical night when the Red Sox won it all for the first time in 86 years. A 2004 World Series highlights package will follow at 9:30 a.m.

And at 11 a.m., watch the classic game from April 20, 2013. It was the first game at Fenway after the Marathon bombings, when David Ortiz gave his epic speech that includes an F-bomb that not even the FCC had an issue with. Daniel Nava won the game with a dramatic homer. “Boston, this is for you,” Don Orsillo appropriately told his viewers on NESN as Nava rounded the bases. The game will be reaired at 11 p.m.

At 2 p.m, the 2013 World Series Film will be shown, allowing viewers to flash back to key moments of that magical “Boston Strong” season.

The most nostalgia-tinted game of the day starts at 4 p.m., when the Yankees and Red Sox celebrate the 100th anniversary of Fenway Park with their game from April 20, 2012.

For those who can’t get enough of Game 4 of the 2004 American League Championship Series -- which is probably nearly all of you -- MLB Network will chronicle the pivotal moments of that game at 7 p.m. as part of the MLB Greatest Games series with studio hosts Bob Costas and Tom Verducci reliving the instant classic with Kevin Millar, a key participant from the game.

* The Athletic

Manfred will allow teams to furlough or reduce pay to some employees

Ken Rosenthal

While the Atlanta Braves, Philadelphia Phillies and San Francisco Giants are among the teams that reportedly will pay employees through May 31, Major League Baseball will inform clubs on Monday of a decision that will give them greater flexibility in dealing with non-playing personnel during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Effective May 1, Commissioner Rob Manfred will suspend Uniform Employee Contracts, enabling teams to furlough employees or reduce their pay, according to major-league sources. Teams would not be required to take such measures, but baseball’s decision would provide the possibility of relief for clubs facing the most significant financial duress as the 2020 season remains on hold.

The Uniform Player Contracts contain a similar provision to the UECs, allowing Manfred to withhold pay in the event of a national emergency. President Trump declared a national emergency on March 13, and players and owners reached an agreement two weeks later on how players would be paid in the event of a shortened or canceled season.

A club’s nonplaying personnel includes managers and coaches at the major- and minor-league levels, some front-office staffers and scouts. Once baseball suspends the contracts of those employees, clubs can talk to them about a variety of adjustments, including the deferral of pay, sources said. The suspension will allow clubs to continue those employees’ health benefits.

Manfred recently informed league staff they would be paid through May 31 while also revealing that he and other senior league employees would see their salaries reduced by an average of 35 percent, according to ESPN.

As baseball continues to discuss plans for how to begin the 2020 season, it is working with a former official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as its lead medical consultant, sources say.

Dr. Ali S. Khan, the dean of the college of public health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center since 2014, spent nearly two decades in a variety of positions with the CDC, most recently as its director of the office of public health preparedness and response.

Khan’s professional interests, according to his biography on the UNMC web site, are emerging infectious diseases, bioterrorism and global health security. He attended the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., and completed a joint residency in internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of Michigan. He later earned a master’s degree in public health at Emory University.

* The New York Post

Dustin Pedroia’s Red Sox future sounds even more ominous

Mark Fischer

Don’t count on Dustin Pedroia making a miraculous return once baseball’s coronavirus-induced suspension finally ends.

The Red Sox great, whose left knee has ailed him since Manny Machado famously slid into it with his spikes in 2017, isn’t “at a point where he’s thinking to be ready to come back and join us,” interim manager Ron Roenicke recently told reporters.

The 36-year-old Pedroia has played in just nine games over the past two seasons due to his troublesome knee, and suffered another significant setback while rehabbing in January.

Pedroia didn’t participate in spring training and was said to be weighing his options, which likely included retirement, when baseball suspended operations on March 12 due to the pandemic.

The Red Sox haven’t had much luck at second base without Pedroia, leading them to sign Jose Peraza this offseason. The 25-year-old Peraza hit .239/.285/.346 in 141 games with the Cincinnati Reds last season.

Pedroia, the 2008 American League MVP, has won two World Series with the Sox, but was inactive for their 2018 title run.

He has made more than $103 million in 15 seasons with Boston, and is slated to earn $13 million annually through the 2022 season.

* The USA Today

Joe Kelly says 2018 Red Sox would have 'swept through the playoffs' if they actually cheated

Henry McKenna

While the MLB's investigation into the Boston Red Sox's cheating scandal from 2018 remains unresolved, players from that squad continue to say they never cheated.

Second baseman Rafael Devers and World Series MVP Steve Pearce are among the Red Sox players who have denied cheating, and former Red Sox and current L.A. Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly chimed in during a recent interview with WEEI.

"From the get-go, I just thought it was laugh-out-loud funny. Now that this is the last thing on people's mind obviously with how the world is right now," Kelly said. "Whenever the investigation is done I'm interested in seeing what is in the investigation.

"If there is cheating involved with how good our team was we should have won every single out. We should have not even lost an inning if there was some good cheating involved, which would have been a lot more fun because we would have won in four. We would have swept through the playoffs and made it really, really fast and been able to go to Hawaii or go to Mexico and go on vacation a lot sooner than we did."

The Red Sox used video replay room illegally to steal signs on the path to winning the World Series during the 2018 season, according to The Athletic's Evan Drellich. The team already fired manager Alex Cora for his involvement in the Houston Astros' cheating scandal; Cora was the Astros' bench coach during their World Series season in 2017.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said March 25 that the investigation into the Red Sox's sign-stealing was "done," but he did not have time to write up the report. He plans to release it before play resumes.

* The Wall Street Journal

Baseball Without Fans Sounded Crazy. It Might Just Work.

Jared Diamond and Louise Radnofsky

It sounded more like science fiction than real life: a proposal to stage the Major League Baseball season in a functional Biodome-like setting in Arizona, sequestering players and other essential personnel in hotel rooms and holding games at various ballparks in the Phoenix area without spectators.

But baseball’s crazy contingency might not be completely crazy after all.

Over the past two weeks, local lawmakers and federal public health experts have given cautious backing to the idea. That has kept it alive among baseball officials even if it still remains far-off and full of complex medical and logistical obstacles.

The most positive development for baseball came on Wednesday, when Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease leader, expressed optimism about the viability of playing an entire season at one location in empty stadiums.

“There’s a way of doing that,” he said on Snapchat’s “Good Luck America” show. “Nobody comes to the stadium. Put them in big hotels wherever you want to play. Keep them very well surveilled and have them tested every week and make sure they don’t wind up infecting each other or their family and just let them play the season out.”

The ability for baseball or any sport to proceed depends on pulling off a complex logistical operation.

For starters, staging a baseball game requires more people than most people imagine. Even with no fans in attendance, it takes more than the players and coaches to put on a major-league season—and even they alone would constitute more than 1,000 people. There are also umpires and clubhouse attendants, stadium security staff and television camera operators, team doctors and bus drivers, groundskeepers and cooks.

MLB must be able to guarantee access to the testing infrastructure to monitor those people every single week of a season—without that taking away capacity from the front-line response to the pandemic, or other sectors of the economy considered to be higher-priority.

At this point, such capacity doesn’t exist in the U.S., meaning that it’s impossible to secure MLB’s self- made bubble. When or if that will change is still unknown, which is why baseball is only in the earliest stages of formulating a comeback.

“Baseball is not going to return until the public health situation has improved to the point that we’re comfortable that we can play games in a manner that’s safe for our players, our employees, our fans, and in a way that will not impact the public health situation adversely,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said in an interview on Fox Business last week.

Manfred has the support of the government to try, however. President Trump has been actively pushing for the return of sports, even without fans in attendance, signaling that to him, they are indeed a priority.

He said last week, “We have to get our sports back. I’m tired of watching baseball games that are 14 years old.” Officials inside government and baseball recognize the role that America’s pastime could fill in showing that the country is back on its feet, with some thinking back to the first game in New York after the Sept. 11 attacks. A July 4 opening day, for instance, would fulfill those dreams.

Manfred is one of several sports executives invited into the large coalition that will advise the federal government on how to reopen the economy. He has met with Trump several times since Trump’s election, golfing with him as recently as October.

“We don’t have a plan,” Manfred said. “We have lots of ideas. What ideas come to fruition will depend on what the restrictions are, what the public health situation is.”

One of those ideas makes Arizona the epicenter of the baseball world, a role state officials appear to welcome. Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who was relatively late to issuing a stay-at-home order in his state, said last week that “Arizona, at the right time, is very open-minded to hosting whatever Major League Baseball would like from the state.”

In some ways, Arizona is the ideal location for baseball to create its quarantine zone. In addition to Chase Field, the Arizona Diamondbacks’ downtown stadium, the Phoenix metro area has 10 spring training sites already used by MLB teams and several colleges with high-quality fields. It also has ample hotel space to keep people isolated.

Unfortunately, the MLB “Biodome” wouldn’t be climate controlled -- leaving baseball to figure out how to play games outside during the extreme heat of the desert summer.

Another idea would be to include Florida, the other state with MLB spring training facilities. Gov. Ron DeSantis, also a Republican, has added professional sports to the list of essential services in his state, paving the way for games in empty stadiums. MLB has acknowledged that playing in Florida “is one of many ideas that has been discussed.”

In addition to the governmental issues, MLB will also need to negotiate with the players’ union to finalize any plan. Besides economic considerations, players have expressed concerns about what would happen if somebody were to contract the virus and whether their families would be allowed to join them -- adding hundreds of additional people that would need to be monitored.

Los Angeles Angels center fielder Mike Trout, the best player in baseball, said in a recent interview with NBC Sports’ “Lunch Talk Live” that “there are a lot of red flags” in regards to having a season. Trout’s wife, Jessica, is pregnant and due to give birth in August, leaving Trout to wonder what would happen if he left the quarantine zone to be with her and then came back.

“The mentality is we want to get back as soon as we can, but obviously it’s got to be realistic,” Trout said.

If there’s a season, it’ll be unlike any other in history. Both MLB and the MLBPA say they are committed to playing as many games as possible, perhaps having scheduled double-headers to add to the total. The regular season could be pushed through October, with the playoffs going through November in warm- weather cities or roofed stadiums. In virtually every case, it’ll start without fans.

Just a few weeks ago, spectatorless sports were considered to be a worst-case scenario. Now, they’re the aspiration—and Dr. Fauci is among those rooting for them.

“People say, ‘Well, you can’t play without spectators,’” Dr. Fauci said. “Well, I think you probably get enough buy-in from people who are dying to see a baseball game, particularly me. I’m living in Washington. We have the world-champion Washington Nationals. I want to see them play again.”