Twins return to Target Field

First day of summer camp! Enjoy some of the sights and sounds from @Twins practice Friday.

Welcome back, baseball! pic.twitter.com/jC7mHaVMBd

— Bally Sports North (@BallySportsNOR) July 4, 2020

The Twins are back at Target Field, finally, for the first time in 2020 (unless you count TwinsFest) and as you might suspect, it’s pretty weird. The team is using all corners of the stadium to encourage social distance, many, if not all players are wearing masks when in direct contact with their teammates, and frankly, it’s just strange to see a bunch of people together right now.

As a reminder of the pervasiveness of COVID-19 in our society, the Twins returned 4 positive tests – Nick Gordon, Edwar Colina, Willians Astudillo and Miguel Sano. This is a reminder as to why the return of baseball is so fraught with concern and underlying tension.

Fortunately, Sano is asymptomatic, though I haven’t heard from Astudillo, Gordon or Colina. This, and all cases in Major League Baseball, may be the closest some people have been to the disease since the pandemic has exploded in the United States. Seeing people whose name we can put with a face, and seeing the wide array of outcomes, from asymptomatic like Sano, to more severe cases like Freddie Freeman of the Atlanta Braves, might be the best lesson or verification of the impacts that many people will receive on the virus to date.

There are a lot of questions that will be answered this summer that we never thought to even ask. How will baseball look with a 60 game schedule? What will virus transmission be like when baseball is played during a pandemic? We’re going to learn a lot of things before all is said and done.