By now every baseball fan is aware of the statement released by Major League Baseball on Tuesday morning suggesting that the 2020 regular season could soon begin, perhaps as early as May and perhaps at a single Cactus League Spring Training facility in Arizona. Here is MLB’s statement verbatim:

“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. 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. While we continue to interact regularly with governmental and public health officials, we have not sought or received approval of any plan from federal, state and local officials, or the Players Association.

“The health and safety of our employees, players, fans and the public at large are paramount, and we are not ready at this time to endorse any particular format for staging games in light of the rapidly changing public health situation caused by the coronavirus.”

Shortly after the MLB statement was released, ESPN’s Jeff Passan, who has been campaigning heavily to resume baseball (ad nauseam) despite the extreme risk in doing so due to the current COVID-19 pandemic that is threatening every human being on the planet, posted an article indicating that one option that MLB is pursuing would allow baseball to resume sometime in May or June at a centralized location in Arizona. This from the Passan article:

“The plan, sources said, would dictate that all 30 teams play games at stadiums with no fans in the Phoenix area, including the Arizona Diamondbacks’ Chase Field, 10 spring training facilities and perhaps other nearby fields. Players, coaching staffs and other essential personnel would be sequestered at local hotels, where they would live in relative isolation and travel only to and from the stadium, sources said. Federal officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the National Institutes of Health have been supportive of a plan that would adhere to strict isolation, promote social distancing and allow MLB to become the first professional sport to return.

“The logistics to pull off such a plan would be enormous and cumbersome on the league side and require the buy-in of players, who sources expect to be skeptical of separating from their families for an indefinite amount of time – perhaps as long as 4½ months, if the inability to stem the coronavirus outbreak keeps teams from playing in their home stadiums in 2020.”

As you might expect, within minutes of Passan posting a link to his article on Twitter, the popular social media platform lit up, including this rather poignant reply from former Dodger and current Oakland A’s s left-hander Brett Anderson suggesting that MLB’s (or perhaps more so Passan’s) plan is not going to happen:

The often outspoken (and usually hilarious) former Dodger has good reason to be skeptical – and concerned – about a potential May or June resumption of baseball activities; four good reasons, in fact. In addition to his own well being (1), such a plan would keep the 32-year-old Midland, TX native away from his wife Morgan (2) and their nine-month-old son Brody (3) for an extended period of time.

But perhaps of bigger concern (4) is that Oakland A’s minor-league coach Webster Garrison is currently in intensive care and on a ventilator with COVID-19.

“I know our organization would likely be opposed to anything that has risk,” Oakland A’s manager Bob Melvin recently told A’s beat writer Susan Slusser. “Not only because of Webster, but in general.”

Melvin added that when concerns about the coronavirus surfaced in early March, the A’s took it very seriously right from the get-go.

“We didn’t encourage our guys to come into our complex immediately after. In fact, we tried to discourage it, and as it turns out, it was the right thing to do,” said the A’s skipper. “We also haven’t laid out any guidelines on how to stay ready. We aren’t going to tell a player to go throw a bullpen or whatever, and they end up getting the virus.”

Brett Anderson and Bob Melvin aren’t the only ones concerned about the inherent risks involved in rushing back before the coronavirus is under control.

“When I first saw the headline, my first initial reaction was, ‘Eh, that’s a bad idea.'” said Kristen Pogreba-Brown, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Arizona. “But I understand why people are not totally writing the idea off. At the same time, I think there are definitely a lot of considerations that need to be made, and you need to decide whether or not it’s worth the risk.”

“We would need to be on the backside of the curve and we would have to be past any threat of hospital overcapacity,” added Will Humble, a 30-year veteran in the public health field and current executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association. “You don’t want to do this in an environment where health care workers are still struggling to keep up. I don’t think these things are going to happen, but you’d need that to be the case.

“One of the things that I think will become more available by then are the serological tests,” added Humble. “Those tests look for the antibodies, and what that shows is whether you’ve been exposed to the virus. If you’ve already been exposed to the virus, you would be super low-risk to get it or spread it.

“By the time you’re talking about this happening, we will have built up a fair amount of herd immunity,” Humble continued. “The virus is trying to keep finding new hosts and reproduce, and the more people that get sick or that get infected and don’t get sick and get the antibodies, those are all people that are no longer a good host for the virus. That’s what’s going to stop this epidemic in the end. That will probably happen before you get a vaccine.”

There is no argument that everyone wants baseball and every other professional and amateur sport to resume. But until medical experts get a safe – and complete – handle on COVID-19, doing so indeed “Begins and ends right here,” as Brett Anderson intuitively noted.

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