Add this to the long list of things the Braves have had to do differently amid the coronavirus pandemic: They are playing a regular-season series at a spring-training stadium this weekend.
The Braves’ three-game series against Toronto, which began Friday night, is being played at the Blue Jays’ spring home, TD Ballpark in Dunedin, Fla., because of Canada’s strict COVID-19 regulations.
Playing regular-season games in a cozy spring-training ballpark might seem weirder if not for all of the other adjustments the Braves -- and everyone else -- have had to make during the pandemic.
“The new normal is something different, I guess,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said from TD Ballpark late Friday afternoon.
He had no complaints about the setup there.
“I tell you, they’ve gone a great job here,” he said. “The field looks great. All the renovations they’ve done, the clubhouse situation, everything here is very comfortable. I think once the game starts, other than the lack of fans, I don’t know that we’ll notice it (being different).”
The Blue Jays have said they’ll play their “home” games in Dunedin, located on Florida’s west coast, near Tampa, through May 24. Beyond that, they are working through various scenarios: keeping the games in Dunedin or moving them to Buffalo, N.Y., where the team played last season, if a return to Rogers Centre in Toronto is still not an option.
The single-deck stadium in Dunedin, extensively renovated in 2019, has 8,500 seats, but the average attendance for games there this month has been 1,455 because of social-distancing protocols. Artificial crowd noise has been piped in for the benefit of telecasts.
Auxiliary light towers were added for the regular-season games in an attempt to boost the stadium lighting toward MLB standards. Clubhouse, training and dining spaces for visiting teams were expanded by adding a temporary structure.
The Blue Jays announced earlier this week that the starting time for the Friday and Saturday games against the Braves, as well as for six other night games scheduled at TD Ballpark in May, would be pushed back a half-hour from 7:07 p.m. to 7:37 p.m. According to the Toronto Star, that change was made because the sun “played havoc” in recent games, affecting third basemen and left fielders in particular just before sunset because of “the height of the stands or lack thereof.”
The Braves didn’t play a spring-training game against Toronto this year and last played in Dunedin in a Feb. 24, 2020, exhibition game. Dunedin is about 90 miles north of the Braves’ spring-training base in North Port, Fla.
