Although President Trump is set to announce something about the future this evening – whatever your politics, I think you can agree we never really know what he’s going to say or what the impact is going to be – it remains the case that, as it pertains to sports, local officials are going to have to be on board before anything can really happen.
To that end, a couple tidbits to share from pertinent governors.
First, the governors of both Arizona and Florida have said they are open to their states hosting whatever games/plan MLB wants to move forward with when public health dictates it can happen (i.e., the Arizona Plan or the Split Plan). To be honest, I hadn’t quite been thinking of that as a hurdle – if it wasn’t OK from a consensus public health perspective, MLB wouldn’t go forward with it anyway, regardless of what the governors said – but it is nevertheless good to know there isn’t some political opposition in those states that I hadn’t considered.
Meanwhile, like groups of governors out west and out east, a group of midwest governors – including Illinois’s J.B. Pritzker – have agreed to a pact that will coordinate their strategies before opening up their economies to more public activity:
BREAKING: The governors of Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana and Kentucky are officially signing on to a multistate pact to coordinate strategies for reopening their economies. https://t.co/MHuFmjWe9E
— Crain's Chicago (@CrainsChicago) April 16, 2020
Of note, the governors cite four criteria to be considered before moving toward opening things back up:
By now, that should read like common sense to most of you, and increasingly, it feels like we’re getting to a good place on at least three of the four – the rub continues to be a dramatic increase in testing and tracing, neither of which is where we need them to be.
To that end, as it relates to sports, nothing at all will happen in these states on the sports front until they feel comfortable “opening things back up,” so to speak, so those are the benchmarks to be tracking. Whether it’s Spring Training Part Two (i.e., training activities at home parks before heading out to wherever), or actual games in empty stadiums, the governors have to give it all the OK first.