Pirates GM Ben Cherington confident season will happen, not sure when

Not long after Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred pushed back the start of the season to as late as mid-May, Pittsburgh Pirates general manager Ben Cherington said “there is a level of confidence” there will be games in 2020 on the major and minor league levels.

But the coronavirus outbreak is so profound Cherington added this disclaimer: “Of course, none of us can know for sure.”

A day after the Center for Disease Control (CDC) urged a nationwide halt to any gatherings of 50 or more people for the next eight weeks, Manfred met Monday with representatives from all 30 clubs.

Later, MLB announced in a release Opening Day, originally scheduled for March 26 and then postponed for two weeks, “will be pushed back in accordance with that guidance” from the CDC.

Speaking on a conference call Monday with Pittsburgh area reporters, Cherington was asked how much further Opening Day could be pushed in order to play a legitimate season.

“The direction and message we’ve gotten from Major League Baseball,” he said, “is in our hope and with every intention, there will be a season.

“We will play major league games, minor league games in 2020, play as many of them as we can.”

To that end, Cherington said club officials, including manager Derek Shelton and director of sports medicine Todd Tomczyk, met with every Pirates player Saturday in Bradenton, Fla.

“Part of that conversation,” Cherington said, “was talking about how to remain in a ready state where we’re not ramping down activity completely. That might look different for different players.

“The idea being, optimally, guys would stay in some sort of ready state so that when we do have better information on a season start, we’d be in a better position to ramp up more quickly than we would in a typical year.

“It could be a shorter amount of time than a typical spring training, but I can’t tell you how long that would be.”

Meanwhile, Cherington said players will continue to work out in Bradenton, Pittsburgh or their homes.

“The vast majority of those players are either in Bradenton or home at this point,” he said.

“What we’ve been asked to do is to make an appropriate level of support staff available for our 40-man roster players. We’ll manage that, so we avoid large numbers of players working out together and that it’s effectively done on a case-by-case basis with each player.”

There’s been no discussion about eliminating those workouts, he said.

The club also is winding down operations at minor league camps at Pirate City in Bradenton and in the Dominican Republic.

Cherington added players expressed disappointment that the same level of work begun at the outset of spring training in February couldn’t continue.

“The hardest part about Saturday and even in the last two days,” he said, “was we had to wind things down and players have left. There really was a sense of disappointment from our players that they couldn’t continue that work.

“We‘ll just need to do it in different ways and believe at some point, we’ll be back together again preparing for a season.”

He said there was excitement in camp about the players’ progress.

“The energy and attention that had gone in to making some adjustments, some important skill adjustments and the attempt to bring that into games,” Cherington said.

“We came into spring training, certainly, with some intentions to try and accomplish some things. Largely, that was happening.”

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