For Mike Fiers and Other Top Starters, Today Was Supposed to Be the Final Tuneup

One minor impact of MLB's COVID-19 shutdown is that Athletics' starter Mike Fiers' whistleblowing against the 2017 Astros sign-stealing scam has faded from the baseball scene. When he finally does pitch again, it may be less of a big deal.

We’ll never know for sure, but it seems today was supposed to have been Mike Fiers’ final start of the spring.

That was equally true for the other 29 pitchers due to be Opening Day starters.

Athletics’ manager Bob Melvin and pitching coach Scott Emerson may have made a decision on whether or not to have Fiers start the opener, but they never made it public.

The last Cactus League appearance for the Opening Day starter typically would have been on March 20, a Hohokam Stadium home game against the White Sox in Mesa

Even while he hadn’t been official declared good to go in the opener, Fiers was 15-4 last year and led the team in starts, innings pitched and wins. That’s a pretty good resume leading into 2020, and the general expectation was that Fiers would have gotten the start when baseball returned to the Oakland Coliseum with a March 26 game against the Minnesota Twins.

Now, he doesn’t know when he’ll be facing batters under competitive fire again.

Before deluge of the COVID-19 coronavirus, Fiers’ name was one of the most frequently invoked this offseason and during spring training. That was the result of the veteran right-hander having been the whistleblower on the 2017 Astros sign-stealing scam that cost the Astros a $5 million fine and led to the general manager, Jeff Luhnow, and manager, A.J. Hinch, to be suspended for the 2020 season by MLB and then fired by the Astros.

If Fiers had pitched in the March 26 opener, he would have faced the Astros on March 31 in his second start with Houston following Minnesota into tow. And there was much conjecture about what that matchup would have been like. Some members of the Astros roster have some enmity toward Fiers, and there was no telling how that would play out.

One thing the coronavirus has done has been to take Fiers’ name out of the everyday conversation. Astros fans are still venting their spleens on twitter from time to time, but the overall number of nasty posting seems to be diminishing.

When the curtain fell on opening day, Fiers had made four starts and was due for a couple more, including the one scheduled for today. After both starts three and four, he told the A’s Mesa media he felt like he was ready to go.

It will be interesting to see how well Fiers pitches, once the season gets underway, because he’ll have to build up arm strength again. He was going to be under a decent amount of pressure and would have been a major focus of MLB media, particularly in the early going. Now there’s a real chance that at least some of those priorities will have changed in this age of COVID-19.

There is the chance now that the media focus will be much less Fiers-centric, and that could ease the pressure he’d feel substantially.