On a back field at Boston Red Sox camp on Wednesday morning, outfielder Jarren Duran offered catcher Connor Wong a high five. Wong responded with an elbow bump. He was just kidding around, he said later, but he had the right idea: The team has Red Sox Fever. Literally.
Along with pitchers’ fielding practice, tie games and ninth-inning at bats taken by players without numbers on their backs, we can add this rite of spring: Nearly every team endures a week when it loses half its roster to a bug. Dozens of players, coaches and staffers descend, from all over the world, upon locker rooms where they decidedly do not practice social distancing.
“There’s always something that happens during spring training,” says righty Lucas Giolito. “It’s flu season, we have allergies, we haven’t built up the immunity yet.”
That actually beats the alternative. “You’re lucky if it hits you during spring training,” says outfielder Trayce Thompson. “You don’t want it to happen during the season. Hopefully all these guys will be back pretty soon, but it’s been weird. Guys are dropping like flies.”
Last week, the Baltimore Orioles passed around a cold. In 2018, the Los Angeles Dodgers suffered what new Red Sox righty Walker Buehler refers to as “the hot tub incident,” when two dozen players picked up a full-body illness that the team traced to the Jacuzzi. Thompson, who was a Dodgers prospect at the time, recalls being so sick that he fell asleep in his car at a Panera in Phoenix. “It was raining and my seat warmers were on,” he says. “I was like, ‘I am dead right now.’” The half-dozen position players who avoided the bug played five or six straight games while they awaited relief. “I know when we got back, the hot tub was crystal clear,” Thompson says.
This week, more than any opponent, the Red Sox are battling an unspecified, infectious gastrointestinal disease—and they are getting, if you will, blown out. Manager Alex Cora begins his daily press briefings with an injury report: On Wednesday, first baseman Triston Casas, utilityman Romy González, top outfield prospect Roman Anthony, top shortstop prospect Marcelo Mayer and non-roster catcher Seby Zavala had all been held out of camp with the bug. (Anthony first developed symptoms on the bus to Sarasota to play the Orioles on Monday and took an Uber 90 miles home.) Cora can’t even commit to lineups for the rest of the week. “We’ll see who’s available,” he says, “And go from there.”
As in 2020, team trainers begin morning meetings with reminders about hygiene. (These are not always heeded in a sport in which the LOOGY has been outlawed but loogies remain rampant.)
The Red Sox argue good-naturedly about whose fault this all is; the older players blame the younger ones, the pitchers blame the hitters. Cora suspects a coach is patient zero but won’t name him.
Those with young children seem notably unscathed. “I’m immune,” says Buehler, whose daughter, Finley, recently turned one and has been kind enough to share every infection she’s ever received. Shortstop Trevor Story has two toddlers, so, he says, “We’ve already had everything.” He is trying to stay away from the young players and to wash his hands, after learning from athletic trainer Brandon Henry this week that hand sanitizer does not kill as many bugs as soap does.
Reliever Liam Hendriks does not have kids but also does not have the bug, which he attributes to this strategy: “Don’t hang out with the youths,” he says with a laugh. He and his wife, Kristi, learned a lot during the pandemic and during Hendriks’s treatment in 2022 and ’23 for stage IV non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and they have remained diligent about handwashing and wiping down their phones. (That, it is pointed out, makes him pretty unusual among baseball players. “Pretty unusual as far as the male population, I think,” he says.)
In some cases, it’s just luck. “Good immune system,” says lefty Garrett Crochet. “Maybe it’s all that Mississippi water I was drinking growing up.”
The upside is that all the absences provide an opportunity for prospects to get at-bats and innings at the major league level, and many have acquitted themselves well. On Wednesday, the remaining Red Sox beat the Rays 4–2. They shook hands. And then, one hopes, they washed them.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Red Sox’ Spring Fever Sweeping Through Boston’s Clubhouse.
