The first, and possibly most important, victory of the 2020 Giants season came Wednesday afternoon. That's when the Giants spread out in busses, drove down to SFO and hopped on a chartered Delta flight to Los Angeles.
It was a trip that wasn't anywhere close to guaranteed three weeks ago, when players and coaches reported to Oracle Park for the first round of coronavirus intake screening, looked around the intense testing area and tried to recognize teammates whose faces were obscured behind masks. But the Giants have made it this far, to Opening Day, with a lot of the credit going to players who embraced the new normal, a coaching staff that turned Oracle Park into Scottsdale Stadium, and a manager who stayed positive and optimistic as he led his team through 19 strange days of summer camp.
If you ask Gabe Kapler how the Giants got here, though, he'll point to people you won't see take the Dodger Stadium field tonight at 7:08 p.m.
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Brad Grems is the home clubhouse and equipment manager, assisted this month by Gavin Cuddie, Mark Sagrafena, Brandon Evans and others. Abe Silvestri is in his first year as director of travel and clubhouse operations, and he works closely with James Uroz, the travel coordinator. In the kitchen, the Giants are led by Leron Sarig, the director of performance nutrition.
It's a group you won't see tonight, but it's one that was crucial in getting the Giants through a hectic month with a sense of normalcy, a sense that they really could make it through a baseball season
"They're so good, they honestly make it seem like it's business as usual," shortstop Brandon Crawford.
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Over three weeks, Crawford found that every little thing still got done, even as the staffers added significant health-and-safety work to their days. If he needed a new undershirt or jockstrap, Grems had it in his locker. If he walked out to the garden in center field, Sarig had prepared elaborate boxed lunches and dinners for players who are used to buffet spreads and late nights at restaurants. If he needed to clean his hands after infield drills, staffers were walking around with bottles of sanitizer. There was just one thing that fell through the cracks at Spring Training 2.0.
"The only bad thing I can say about Abe is that he forgot the login info for the Show Shoes IG," Crawford said.
Silvestri, the longtime visiting clubhouse manager, can be forgiven. He's in his first year in charge of travel and the Giants had no issues getting 60 players, 13 coaches and dozens of others to San Francisco. With help from MLB, Johnny Cueto was put on a private jet from the Dominican Republic. Chadwick Tromp took a chartered flight to Miami with others from Aruba, then connected to San Francisco. Everyone who arrived in San Francisco was encouraged to stay at a boutique hotel not far from the ballpark, and 42 players did. In all, the Giants booked 82 rooms to create their own bubble.
"I don't know how they've done it. They set me up in the hotel with three days of notice, had all of our stuff here and ready when we all got to the ballpark, all of our equipment," said starter Logan Webb, who had been training in Arizona. "Everything they've done has been efficient. I know they have a lot of hurdles to deal with, but honestly, they've done it with ease."
Webb was one of many Giants to find that, when the kitchen was moved out to the garden in center field, the comforts players have grown used to made the trip. He left the park every day with Red Bulls, coconut water, bottled water and string cheese, along with a box lunch that was put together by the staff and included a salad and plenty of options for protein. At night, boxed dinners were delivered to the hotel and brought up to the players to limit their contact with outsiders. When players did eat at the park, tables and lounge chairs were spread out underneath the center field bleachers so they could eat together but still practice distancing.
"It's nonstop work out there, and you talk about the stress of not just preparing meals right now, but making sure they're nutritionally balanced and they're packaged up so they're easy to take away and nobody's hand is on the food," Kapler said. "All of these meals are tailored to each player and they're individually packaged. And they're aesthetically pleasing, too. In order to make that happen, you've got to have a level of customer service commitment that's pretty damn high."
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Kapler found that out when it came to his own favorite drink. In Philadelphia, he discovered Topo Chico, a mineral water that comes in a slick glass bottle and three flavors -- regular, twist of lime and twist of grapefruit (the most popular among the staff). Kapler said he drinks four or five a day, and some of his coaches have become similarly hooked. When they went out to the makeshift dining room, they found the fridges that were moved out there were well stocked.
"It's a perfect example of a personal touch," Kapler said. "Right now you think about all of the concerns that we have and sometimes a personal touch makes this feel like home. And if we could just create a little more of that comfort, I think that spills out onto the field. The personal touches go a long way."
The work on that field largely was the brainchild of first-year bench coach Kai Correa, who had to figure out how 60 players could get their work in on one field every day while staying a proper distance apart. Correa said what stood out to him about the abbreviated camp was the way the clubhouse staff created new spaces for lockers and "took care of the needs of triple the staff and double the players."
To spread everyone out, Silvestri and Grems made use of both the home and visiting clubhouses. They found extra space wherever they could, moving a handful of coaches' lockers into the dining room of the home clubhouse. Veteran Jeff Samardzija was given the entire visiting manager's office during camp. All of this was set up when players arrived.
"It's hours upon hours of work," Correa said of the clubhouse employees. "They're here before we get here and they're here long after we leave. They'll respond to a text at any hour. They're the glue that's holding this all together."
For all the work that needed to be done, it was just as important to find corners that could be cut to make sure enough time was spent on safety protocols. The Giants did not put names on the backs of jerseys for guys like Marco Luciano and Will Wilson -- who were not going to make the team -- since the coaching staff viewed that as wasted energy for the clubhouse guys. Efficiency was prioritized, and that's seen in how the Giants attacked a complex problem like keeping hands clean as players went through workouts during a pandemic.
"There's hand sanitizer posted on walls everywhere. You can't walk 10 yards without stopping to wash your hands, and I'm watching players and staff do that diligently," Kapler said. "It's something they don't even think about anymore. You walk by and there's a hand sanitizer. What people don't realize in camp is that they were strategically placed by Brad and his staff so that you wouldn't even think about it. And guys now aren't going to the bathroom to turn on faucets, because the sanitizer is everywhere."
Kapler said what stood out to him the most was how clean this camp was, noting that the clubhouse staff is "constantly cleaning" with an attention to detail. The early results, at least, seem promising. The Giants had three members of the organization test positive for COVID-19 during initial intake screening, but none during camp.
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They'll take the field tonight healthy and much more confident than they were three weeks ago, in large part because of all the people who worked behind the scenes.
"Because they were calm and collected, it made us feel like everything was going to be okay, and if we had problems, they would fix it right away," catcher Tyler Heineman said. "They are the real reason why we even got to this point."