No sharing of bats and other equipment. Definitely no spitting and no chewing of tobacco or seeds inside the dugout. No high fives either.
Players will also be immediately ejected if they come within six feet of an umpire or another player during an argument.
Usual practices that have made baseball fun will have to be abandoned to give way to the new normal amid the coronavirus pandemic, based on the guidelines issued by the World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC).
Those guidelines will form the foundation of the protocols the Philippine Amateur Baseball Association (Paba) will submit to the government so that it can be allowed to gradually reopen.
“We are reviewing it and preparing our own guidelines for submission to the [Philippine Sports Commission]. We are also closely watching the developments of the spread of the virus as this will influence our final guidelines,” said Paba secretary general Pepe Muñoz.Members of the Philippine team are now currently training at home and could only be monitored by coaches via Zoom, according to Muñoz.
Allowing the Nationals, the reigning Southeast Asian Games champions, to at least get to the field and do some drills will be a big boost for them both physically and mentally.Though they were preparing for the World Classic qualifier when the pandemic struck, they are not included in the new batch of sports likely to be green-lighted by the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF).The set of WBSC guidelines include universal practices of social distancing and hygiene like “no licking of fingers” for players, and no employing of bat/ball personnel, which means that the players would now need to retrieve some of their equipment themselves.There will also be new set of balls after every half inning, no lineup exchange at the home plate, and ball preparation will have to be done by an appointed personnel.
These measures were adapted by Major League Baseball (MLB), which will unveil a shortened season on July 23 where only 60 games will be played by each team—less than half of its usual season. INQ