Early Monday evening, social media was at its finest when popular Dodgers broadcasters Joe Davis and Orel Hershiser hosted Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten and Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman on YouTube for a video conference via the Dodgers Twitter account.

During the near 15-minute (almost live) broadcast, the two Dodgers executives and their two hosts covered a wide variety of topics, most of which centered around the state of the team under current city, county, state, and federally-mandated social-distancing and self-quarantine guidelines as a result of the extremely contagious coronavirus pandemic currently facing the entire human race.

Although every baseball fan on the planet is looking (and praying) for the resumption of life as we know it, including the start of the 2020 regular baseball season, Kasten made it abundantly clear that neither he nor the others could not and would not even begin to speculate when that might be. In fact, the Dodgers’ top boss was emphatic about it.

“In talking with [MLB commissioner Rob Manfred] and the health authorities, they think it’s really important for us to not speculate on those things because different people have different guesses and we would be misleading fans and convince them that one opinion is right and one is wrong,” Kasten said. “By all means, Andrew, talk about the process, but let’s preface this by saying we just don’t know, Joe, we just don’t know.”

That “process” that Kasten was referring to is the amount of time it would take for players to get back into game-ready shape through what would amount to a second Spring Training once MLB is given the green light to resume baseball activities from the CDC and WHO.

“I think from our standpoint … for our position players and for our relievers, I think it is going to be easier to get them up to speed and ready to go,” Friedman explained. “It’s our starters that it’s a little more challenging and the fact that it is an unknown of when we’re going to start that. You can’t even work backwards to a date, so you don’t want to be too aggressive on the front end, but you don’t want to be too passive. And so it’s trying to find… strike that right corner.

“But right now and as we’re continuing to learn more, to do as much as we can to get our starters back to getting off the mound and doing things like that, that’s the group that I’m most focused and I’m acutely aware of, and that’s going to be where a lot of our attention is spent,” Friedman added. “And I think it’s going to take a little bit of time, and ideally, we can do some of that even before we get back together formally.”

Perhaps the only positive to come out of the delayed start of the 2020 regular season is that it has and continues to allow for the completion of the renovations at Dodger Stadium, most notably to the new center field plaza.

“All of us for this last year, certainly this offseason, are just waiting for the new additions, the renovations, the center field renovations,” said Kasten. “I think that all the field facing stuff like the seating and the drink rail and the bar and all of that stuff is ready to go, would have been ready to go for our first game the first day.

“We still have stuff in the plaza that is being filled in right now, and yes, it has slowed down, some crews are smaller than others, but we are – and everyone – is fully compliant with all of the regulations, again, of the county, city, and state, as well as the CDC and WHO,” he added. “All of those things are super important to all of us. But consistent with all of that guidance, the work is continuing and, as we’ve been saying from the start, not only are we going to have a lot of cool new spaces, but we’re going to have bars and restaurants and new food offerings that we haven’t even announced yet that I think are pretty exciting; new vendors coming in that have never been in the stadium before.

“We’re going to have history displays and we’re going to have batting cages, pitching machines, and stuff for kids,” Kasten elaborated. “It’s just super cool space, cool space to hang out, cool space to come before the game, cool space to hang out after the game. It’s going to make the stadium that all of us love, the stadium that I have always maintained is the most beautiful stadium ever built to play or watch the game of baseball, it’s going to still be that only better with more amenities for a true 21st-century stadium.”

Positive indeed.

…when play resumes, that is.

Play Ball!

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