Newsom's Plan For California All But Rules Out Fans in Coliseum Stands for Baseball

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, in talking about how the state will go forward, says large-scale events including fans are `not in the cards' in the near future.

The flip side of Major League Baseball’s competing plans to either restart the baseball season in Arizona, or in Arizona and Florida or maybe who knows where is the growing certainty that fans will not be flocking to the Oakland Coliseum for baseball or to any other California venue for any sport or other entertainment for an unknowable number of months.

Could that last into 2021? Too early to tell.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom didn’t explicitly rule fans returning to stadiums and arenas during a Tuesday news conference in which he talked about easing statewide restrictions, but he’s clearly in the listen-to-the-scientists category.

That means sticking with what’s working – so keeping large crowds from forming is going to stay in place going forward.

“The prospect of mass gatherings is negligible at best,” he said, “until we get to herd immunity and we get to a vaccine. So large-scale events that bring in hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of strangers all together across every conceivable difference — health and otherwise — is not in the cards based upon our current guidelines and current expectations.”

For the Oakland A’s (this applies in large measure to the San Francisco Giants as well), that means that if baseball is allowed to start up again, there will not be any fans watching baseball in the stands to take in the games.

Newsom’s implication was that only individuals essential to making baseball be baseball – players, some front office staff, clubhouse personnel, security, television personnel and the like – would be on hand.

That’s not to say that there is any guarantee that baseball will be played in the Bay Area at all this season. MLB apparently is kicking around playing in just Arizona, using spring training facilities, or playing a season divided between Arizona and Florida.

For the near term, fans don’t have any baseball options at all, other than the occasional games televised from the other side of the Pacific. If baseball does come back, fans, in California at least, will almost certainly be limited to watching games on television or via streaming services.