After a winter of uncertainity, MLB prepares for a complicated spring training

A dozen or so baseball reporters were navigating the usual frustrations of a Zoom news conference recently when the subject of the day’s proceedings – the just re-signed slugger Marcell Ozuna – piped up with a question of his own.

“Alex, I’ve got a question for you,” Ozuna said, addressing Braves General Manager Alex Anthopolous, who had just gushed about how quickly the outfielder’s four-year deal worth $65 million came together.

“If you was thinking signing Marcell Ozuna was easy, why didn’t you do [it] after the season ended?”

Anthopolous dodged at first, but then a reporter re-upped the inquiry on Ozuna’s behalf. Anthopolous, known for being tight-lipped about his team’s personnel matters, finally relented.

“At the beginning of the offseason, there was a lot of uncertainty from a team payroll standpoint, from an industry standpoint,” he said. Ozuna chuckled.

“Uncertainty” is, and has been, the defining obstacle for Major League Baseball during the past year, and it will loom over the sport and all those invested in it as spring training begins in the coming days.

That the 2021 season would be played in a country still ravaged by the coronavirus has been certain for months now. But whether the league and its players could agree on terms by which to navigate the pandemic – whether owners would lose another year of ticket revenue, whether National League teams like the Braves would be allowed to use players like Ozuna in a designated hitter role again, and so on – remained in flux until this week.

Uncertainty was central to both the league’s and players’ union’s arguments throughout another winter of heated labor negotiations. MLB executives have had to build rosters incorporating it and despite it. Players have had to plan their normally meticulous routines around it.

Such is the tumult in which the sport is trying to start anew next week, even as a new strain of the virus emerges in Florida, and the old one continues to plague Arizona. Players have already begun to converge on their spring training facilities in both states, and they must now do so in time to complete a five-day quarantine before reporting to camp – a requirement of the health and safety protocol MLB and the MLBPA agreed to just a week before pitchers and catchers were scheduled to begin.

Under normal circumstances, a free agent slugger hitting the market after the kind of season Ozuna had in 2020 would have a variety of suitors with clear need for his services and money to spend. He led the National League in homers and finished third in on-base-plus-slugging. He is 30 years old, still in his prime.

But Ozuna stepped into free agency on far less stable ground. To start with, he had compiled those statistics in a shortened, unorthodox season that may or may not provide meaningful insight into his trajectory.

Ozuna also had compiled those numbers as a designated hitter. National League teams did not know until this month that they would not be allowed a DH in 2021. The size of Ozuna’s market was likely halved when the MLB and players’ union agreed to a deal without the universal designated hitter, since National League teams no longer had an obvious place to play him.

And while the free agent market has moved slowly for many offseasons now, uncertainty added a new level of friction this time. Several teams, facing financial pressure amid the pandemic, chose to non-tender players they might have otherwise taken to arbitration, adding a glut of talent to the market that might not otherwise have been there. Closers Brad Hand and Archie Bradley, for example, were non-tendered and joined a relief market already brimming with options. The Cubs non-tendered outfielder Kyle Schwarber, then were able to replace him with a near-identical hitter in Joc Pederson – for less money than Schwarber got from his new team, the Washington Nationals.

More free agent options did not necessarily make things easier for the teams, many of whom hedged their bets all winter.

Until recently, for example, Anthopolous could not have been certain whether he could sign Ozuna as a designated hitter, or whether he would be paying not only for his offense, but for his sometimes-suspect defense, too. Teams spent much of the offseason wondering how much of the usual ticket revenue they could count on – not only because of questions about whether fans would be able to attend games, but also because the length of the season had not been settled – and ended it still wondering when crowds could pour into stadiums again.

Budgets remained in flux for many teams, even as many free agents were paid near traditional market values. The lack of a minor league season in 2020 complicated front offices’ attempts to evaluate their own players.

“You may not have the history to evaluate from last year, so you’re just trying to take that one step at a time for who he is and plan player by player,” Reds General Manager Nick Krall said in a call with reporters. Krall also acknowledged another complication facing executives: not only would evaluating their own players be more difficult than ever, but until this week, they did not know how many players they would be allowed to bring to spring training to evaluate.

Not until Monday night did the league and players’ union agree to health and safety guidance that capped the number of players allowed in any camp at 75. Instead of stashing top prospects at minor league camp and bringing them over to major league games for a few at-bats now and then, teams will now be inviting top prospects – even those a few years away from the big leagues – to major league camps.

“Last year, the line between the big leagues and the minor leagues got blurred,” Rangers President Jon Daniels told reporters Thursday. “In some ways, almost beyond last year, that certainly continues into this year and maybe permanently.”

Daniels admitted that for a rebuilding team like his, bringing more young players into major league camp becomes “a feature, not a bug” because auditioning veterans for one bench or bullpen spot is not a priority.

But with more minor leaguers headed to big league camps, fewer at-bats and innings may be available for the kind of veterans who use spring training to earn second chances, even as more veterans found themselves unsigned in the last week of the offseason.

In recent days, dozens of proven veterans have secured minor league deals with spring training invitations. Former all-stars such as Brandon Kintzler, Jed Lowrie and Jonathan Lucroy were among those to sign such deals since earlier this week.

Organizations are scrambling to address logistical problem beyond the player roster, too. Many teams normally bring a large contingent of staffers to camp each year and are having to figure out, on the fly, where they can cut back. At least one organization will do its in-game production from up north. Because last year’s spring training eventually restarted as a summer camp at home ballparks, the impact of smaller staffs on spring training operations remains to be seen.

The sport, too, has had to scramble. The Grapefruit League schedule has been restructured to keep teams in smaller pods that limit travel. Instead of Florida’s east coast teams traveling to the west coast hub around Tampa to play a few spring training games, those 15 teams will only play nearby clubs.

And after announcing bulked-up contact tracing protocol that will require players to wear Kinexon tracers whenever they are working at team facilities, the league must secure enough of the devices and distribute them to organizations by early next week. According to a league spokesman, those tracers will be rolled out early in spring training.

The goal of those tracers, and of other additions to the health and safety rules , is to prevent a major outbreak, which could throw the season into limbo.

No one knows exactly what will happen if such an outbreak occurs. No one has known exactly what to expect for quite some time.