OC Register: Hoornstra: Every MLB team’s biggest offseason move? Making games safe again

[AngelsWin.com]

Unless you happened to be in Arlington, Texas for the World Series or the National League Championship Series, attending a Major League Baseball game in person is more a dream than a recent memory.

Inside the business offices of MLB’s 30 franchises, people are hard at work filling in the mundane details of that dream, the kind you typically forget when you wake up in the morning. The hope is that these details will encourage you rather than deter you from attending a game in 2021 when tickets become available.

Few teams have announced details around what their fan experience will look like in a COVID-19 world. The reasons are obvious. The effects of a global pandemic on public policy vary from week to week, state to state, and county to county. The federal government is in a state of transition. The availability and effectiveness of a vaccine might turn public gatherings into a much safer endeavor. Spring training games are three months away, and even those plans have not been universally finalized.

Gil Fried, a professor of Sport Management at the University of New Haven’s Pompea College of Business and a consultant to major league teams on stadium safety issues, said three possible scenarios are being examined for 2021: one with no fans in attendance, one with partial fans – “about 20 percent or so” – and one with fully open stadiums.

Each of these scenarios assumes it will be safe to stage a season in 2021, and even that’s not a given. For now, the overriding sense is that having fans in the ballpark next year is a question of “when” and not “if.”

“Strictly my personal perspective: no fans to start,” Fried said. “In the middle of the year, I think we’re going to have enough of the people with coverage – with vaccines or herd immunity – that they’re going to be able to open up around May.”

What will change?

Some things are obvious, like reducing the number of germ-carrying objects that change hands. The Cleveland Indians recently announced that paper tickets will no longer be accepted for admission. Fans entering Progressive Field in 2021 must use the MLB Ballpark app, the team’s website, or the StubHub app to present a digital ticket.

The Angels are planning to introduce an all-digital admission policy next year too, a decision that has not been previously reported. Most teams surveyed for this story did not have a digital-only ticket policy in place prior to the pandemic.

Inside the ballpark, using cash to pay the roaming vendor or concessions cashier might not be an option anymore. Almost every major league stadium was still accepting some cash payments in 2019.

Other changes will be less obvious.

“Some (teams) are switching from traditional handrails to ones made out of brass or copper because they are not as good of a conductor for viruses, and can actually help kill viruses,” Fried said. “They are looking at options like that right now.”

These decisions, however mundane or well-intentioned, have consequences. In March of 2014, the Dodgers announced season-ticket holders would no longer receive physical tickets. The entrance to Dodger Stadium was outfitted to scan the new digital tickets as fans held their smartphones in front of turnstiles.

But not every fan had a smartphone in 2014 or wanted to buy one to attend a baseball game. Some simply preferred keeping physical tickets as a souvenir. Some complained. Eventually, the Dodgers made printed tickets available for a fee. Then as now, the first new policies of 2021 will surely not be the last.

MLB offered something of a blueprint when it opened 13 postseason games to one-quarter capacity at Globe Life Field. All tickets were issued digitally. Cash payments were still allowed inside the park on a limited basis. Seats were opened to fans in clusters of four, with the nearest cluster no less than six feet apart. Mask-wearing was mandatory, except when fans were eating or drinking in their seats. (Televised shots from the ballpark repeatedly showed less than full compliance with this mandate.)

If playing every game as scheduled counts as successful, the league’s attempt to re-introduce fans was a masterstroke. Still, not every available seat at Globe Life Field was occupied. Game 1 of the NLCS fell 800 short of the announced 11,500-seat capacity. Maybe that’s because the games were staged in a remote location for fans based in Los Angeles and Atlanta. Maybe safety concerns inside the park lessened the demand for tickets too.

The league employs a centralized security and facility management department, which played a significant role in coordinating preparation of Globe Life Field. Like the principals for all 30 teams, MLB is monitoring the course of the novel coronavirus and the development of a vaccine. It’s also keeping tabs on the response of elected officials in the states and counties that stage baseball games.

The synergy between teams and governments will be key, Fried said.

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“I can see local municipalities mandating that a team or a facility have a health official at every game,” he said. “That adds a cost to it. What if in the middle of the game they say, ‘it’s too dangerous. We’re canceling the rest of the game.’ Do they have the authority to do that? Are you going to let them do that? What could be the potential ramifications?”

The task facing teams this offseason isn’t merely to prepare a series of protocols for that magical day when their park re-opens to fans. They must minimize fear – of bringing home a virus, of attending a game that might be postponed through no fault of your own – while still replicating an experience familiar to anyone who attended a game before the pandemic.

It’s a tall order for every team and a more important one than filling out a starting rotation or including the right prospect in a trade. If the protocols are a success, identifying the “winner” of the offseason will be easy: the fans.

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