Angels news: Mike Trout on baseball’s return to the field

Getting Major League Baseball back on the field again requires a lot of boxes to be checked. Ultimately, whatever the plan for the 2020 season is — whether it’s confined to Arizona, or perhaps spring sites in Arizona and Florida, or maybe domed stadiums and warm-weather cities only — will need to be approved by the players.

Clayton Kershaw said this week that separating completely from his family during the baseball season — as one version of the ideas being discussed entails — would be a dealbreaker for him. Mike Trout, whose wife Jessica is expecting their first child this summer, raised similar concerns in an interview with NBC Sports on Wednesday.

“We obviously want to play as fast as we can, get to a city. Maybe Arizona, they’re floating out Florida. Being quarantined in a city, if we play a couple months, it will be difficult for some guys,” Trout told host Mike Tirico on Lunch Talk Live. “What are you going to with family members? My wife is pregnant. What am I going to do when she goes into labor? Am I going to have to quarantine for two weeks after I come back? Because obviously I can’t miss the birth of our first child.

“There’s a lot of red flags, a lot of questions. Obviously we’d have to agree on it as players. But I think the mentality is we want to get back as soon as we can, but it’s got to be realistic. We can’t be sitting in hotel rooms, just going from the field to hotel rooms and not being able to do anything I think that’s pretty crazy.”

Links

• Angels outfielder Brian Goodwin relishes Jackie Robinson Day, writes Rhett Bollinger at MLB.com. Said Goodwin: “I feel Jackie Robinson really hits home because of who he was and what he meant to the game. The experiences he went through, fortunately, it took somebody a lot stronger than me to deal with. He was one of those people who was well-equipped to maneuver through it and come out on top.”
• Ty Buttrey is off to a 1-7 start so far in the MLB The Show Players League, despite enlisting the help of Angels fan Ryan Wilcox (aka McGunski), writes Maria Torres at the LA Times.
• Angels play-by-play broadcaster Victor Rojas talked to Brittany Ghiroli of The Athletic about his Big Fly Gear clothing company, which he and his wife run out of their house. “We started it with the thought that we could grow it from a grassroots perspective,” he says.