TAMPA, Fla. — Around 12:30 p.m., as the groundskeeper waited, Gio Urshela and Gleyber Torres stopped their workout and began to pick up baseballs from around the field, then gathered up their bats and gloves and headed to their cars. They have to clear out of the way so the field could be ready for the big high school game in just a few hours.
This is big league life in the lockout.
“We’ve been working out here [all offseason],” Urshela said after taking infield and hitting on the field. “We’ll just keep doing it. We want to play, we’re ready to go. We can’t just be sitting on the couch. We have to keep ourselves ready.”
On the day that big leaguers would be heading to their complexes across Florida and Arizona in a normal year, they are working out on their own because of the owners’ lockout. When the league instituted the lockout on Dec. 2, that precluded players from using team facilities or any contact with team personnel.
Now, as negotiations continue to crawl, spring training games, scheduled to begin Feb. 26 for the Yankees, are almost definitely going to be delayed and as the negotiations continue to stall out the March 31 scheduled opening day is in jeopardy.
For most players, who are creatures of habit, it’s a hitch in their routines.
“We just want to play. Hopefully, the negotiations will move [along],” Urshela said. “We want to get back.”
But for now, both players and the fans who usually book trips around their favorite team’s spring training are in a holding pattern, as are the local businesses and workers who rely on spring training, as the negotiations between the two sides inch along.
But, it’s something the players are prepared for.
“It’s like 2020. That helped us [figure out] how to do this now, for sure,” Urshela said.
The coronavirus pandemic shut down spring training suddenly in 2020 for nearly four months. The teams’ complexes were closed, but many of the Yankees have homes in the Tampa area — as do many players from other teams who have complexes in the area like the Phillies, Blue Jays and obviously the Rays — and scrambled to put together fields to work out on. Now, they have those spots to go back to as they wait for the owners and union to come to an agreement on a collective bargaining unit.
That interrupted 2020 spring also gave the players and owners insight into how long they need a training camp to be. They had three weeks in 2020 and had an increase in injuries to pitchers, which many attribute to the short ramp-up.
“I think four weeks would be OK,” Urshela said when asked how long they would need. “I am ready to go now, but four weeks for everyone.”
The 2020 shutdown also prepared everyone for how contentious these collective bargaining negotiations would be. The back and forth between players and owners over health and safety and the length of the season, which affected players’ pay, foreshadowed the bitterness that lingers and which seems to be slowing down the process.
So Tuesday afternoon, it was the team from Hillsborough Community College that was walking on the fields at George M. Steinbrenner Field, not the Yankees. Instead, players like Torres and Urshela were back on those high school fields that have small stands, concrete and chain-link fence dugouts and a time limit because of the high school schedule.
Fortunately for them, high school baseball is very big around here.
“The fields are amazing,” Luke Voit said last week. “We didn’t have them that nice in Missouri.”
For Urshela, it probably wouldn’t matter too much.
“I just like to be out there hitting and playing,” Urshela said.
Urshela, who struggled with injuries last season, said he feels “100 percent,” right now. The hamstring, knee and hand injuries that plagued him in 2021 are gone and he’s in shape ready to play the 2022 season. He’s spent most of his time getting himself healthy since the Yankees' season ended in the American League wild-card game.
“I feel good, really good,” said Urshela, who played in 116 games last season and slashed .267/.301/.419. “No issues.”
