White Sox left fielder Eloy Jimenez is ready to play baseball. It’s what Jimenez does, it’s what he always has done since he can remember and it’s what he has already made a good living doing at age 23.
He wants to earn his paycheck.
“We’re supposed to be playing baseball right now,” Jimenez said from Arizona on a conference call Tuesday. “It’s not in my hands, but I just want to play baseball.”
Jimenez came to spring training bent on improving on the 31 homers and .267/.315/.513. hitting line he produced as a rookie last season. He set his alarm for 4:40 a.m. every day and was one of the first White Sox to arrive at the team’s spring training complex before 5:30. Jimenez was rounding into form, only a couple of weeks away from Opening Day, when a COVID-19 changed everything and put the season on hold.
The Sox were primed to have a breakout season after three years of rebuilding.
“It’s been hard because the team we have right now was ready to go,” Jimenez said. “It happened for a reason, it’s just not in our hands.”
No one knows when baseball will resume, but plans are being discussed for starting the season perhaps as soon as late May, although under strange, heretofore unseen, and possibly quite difficult conditions. Major League Baseball is considering having all 30 teams sequestered in the Phoenix area in May and playing made-for-TV games at 10 spring training sites, Chase Field and perhaps a few college fields for as long as necessary.
“MLB has been actively considering numerous contingency plans that would allow play to commence once the public health situation has improved to the point that it is safe to do so,” the commissioner’s office said in a statement. “While we have discussed the idea of staging games at one location as one potential option, we have not settled on that option or developed a detailed plan.”
Fans would not be allowed to attend and players would be separated from families. Players might have to sit in the empty stands six feet apart from each other in accordance with COVID-19 social distancing protocol. Games would be played in the blistering Arizona summer heat.
”For me, playing with fans is motivating,” he said. “I want to play hard every single day for them and I enjoy talking to them. I don’t know what it’s going to be like to play without fans there.”
Tough decisions might have to be made to save a season.
“I don’t know if I could look at my kids just through a screen for four or five months. Same thing goes with my wife,” Red Sox pitcher Chris Sale told the Associated Press. “That’s a long time. But people have done it in harsh scenarios, I guess. I think there’s a lot of figuring out to do.”
Jimenez is single but he is close to his family and being separated for a long stretch would be difficult, he said, “but if that’s the plan, then I agree. I just want to play baseball.
“If they decide to play here [in Arizona], I’m going to enjoy it, but we want to play a normal regular season, like travel and all that. And play for our city, you know?”
