Price, Posey, MLBers who opted out for virus excited for '21

David Price spent much of 2020 in front of his television, watching from afar as his Los Angeles Dodgers chased an elusive World Series championship.

Trepidation about playing baseball through a pandemic trumped his urge to play — but that doesn’t mean the 2012 AL Cy Young Award winner never thought about an early return.

“It definitely crossed my mind,” Price said Friday from Dodgers spring training in Glendale, Arizona. “But I didn’t want to just come back to be back. I wanted to come back to stay.”

Sixteen months since his last competitive game, Price is indeed back, just like many of the nearly 20 big leaguers who opted out of the coronavirus-shortened 2020 season — a list including All-Stars like San Francisco’s Buster Posey, Milwaukee’s Lorenzo Cain, the New York Mets’ Marcus Stroman and Washington's Ryan Zimmerman.

Traded from Boston to the Dodgers last February, the 35-year-old Price pitched in spring exhibitions for LA before deciding to go home. Instead of playing, he did what many Americans have done with their unexpected time — he watched a lot of TV.

“On the West Coast, baseball starts at 10 a.m.,” he said. “I had baseball on TV all day long, East Coast games and West Coast games.”

Coming back after all that wasn’t a hard decision.

“I feel like our team and MLB handled it extremely well,” Price said. “I know they had a lot of protocols they had to go through. The training staff were bending over backwards to keep guys COVID free.

“We have a lot more information on it now,” he added. “All of that played into the decision to play this year. I knew I wanted to play this year.”

Nationals right-hander Joe Ross echoed that sentiment. He hasn’t pitched since starting Game 5 of the 2019 World Series, passing on a...

source https://www.chron.com/sports/article/Price-Posey-MLBers-who-opted-out-for-virus-15966684.php