Pirates embrace return to PNC Park, although Shelton speaks of caution

After months of being away, there are Pirates on the shore of the Allegheny once again.

Wednesday was the first day to report for the Pirates as spring training 2.0 began to take shape at PNC Park. More players should arrive Thursday as Major League Baseball chartered flights for many players from the Dominican Republic.

The first team workout will be Friday morning, but some players started to do light drills Wednesday.

"It was nice to see people back on the field," Derek Shelton said during a Zoom call. "It was nice to see guys back together, although it was in much smaller groups and away from each other. But there was baseball activity on PNC. That was something that fired me up.”

The alternate summer camp in Altoona, Pa., should start in the near future, but they will drag behind the MLB camp a little to make sure all protocols are met.

This return to PNC Park has come later than expected, even without taking the COVID-19 pandemic into consideration. Pitching coach Oscar Marin told me in May that they were planning to return around June 10, the original date MLB hoped to start summer camp. As negotiations between the league and players association went on, that date kept getting pushed back.

During the shutdown, coaches told players to stay ready for the return. Once it became clear negotiations were coming to a close and the season was about to start, Shelton said the message became, "OK, it’s go time."

"Our strength and conditioning and medical teams sent out specific return-to-play guidelines for what their movements should be," Shelton said. "... Part of my general message with these guys was just honesty with your bodies. We talked about that at the beginning of spring training, too. With a soft-tissue injury, we can lose you for four weeks, which is half the season now. So, if you’re feeling something or you think you’ve got something going on, you’ve gotta be honest with us so we can make sure we work from there."

Pirates starting pitchers should be stretched out to about four or five innings for the start of camp. They threw throughout the shutdown and have been throwing live batting practices since late May.

Shelton said, to his knowledge, nobody has opted out of the season or will come into camp hurt outside of the injuries they know about, such as Jameson Taillon.

This will be unlike any training camp in baseball history, mostly because it will be more divided than usual. It's normal for specific groups to receive instruction by themselves during spring training, such as catchers and outfielders, but part of the league's health and safety protocols will limit how many people can actually be on the field at a time. There will be multiple groups working out through different parts of the day at PNC Park this camp.

There is some flexibility in who will be in which group each day, though.

"We can mix and match, just because of the fact that everybody has tested and everybody has gone through the protocol, and then obviously, there’s lengths of social distancing and how things happen in the clubhouse and how these guys are together when they eat and all these things," Shelton said. "So mixing and matching amongst this group is not an issue, so you will most likely not see the same guys in the group every day, just because of the fact that we’re functionally trying to get different work done, and because of the fact we’re not all together at once, there may be something isolated time-wise we’re working on with someone specifically or maybe even a group of people. Maybe we get our middle infielders today to work on double plays and maybe the next day they’re not together, for example. So we can definitely mix and match within that group."

Those groupings will change once intrasquad games begin. It would be the first live competition these players have faced since spring training was suspended March 12.

While some players might be eager to get back into game scenarios, even against their own teammates, Shelton said they will not rush the process.

"I think it’s going to be a matter of Oscar being able to get his eyes on our guys throwing bullpens and, probably the most important thing for our position players is making sure they’re ramped up enough to run the bases and are able to do movements," Shelton said. "So the general answer for that would be, once we determine we’re able to do it health-wise we’ll get into some simulated game-type stuff. Until our assessments are done, we won’t do it."

Camp will be three weeks long, with the Pirates' first game being either July 23 or 24. The latter is more likely.

They are also hoping to set up some exhibition games by the end of camp. Right now, the league is permitting each club to have up to three exhibitions before the regular season.

"We definitely would like to play some outside competition," Shelton said.