The Twins employ physicians, trainers, strength coaches, massage therapists, even a dietitian, all to make sure the players have everything they need to be physically ready to play. But for the mental part? Marwin Gonzalez has a support system that he decided he couldn't be without for the next three months: his wife, Noel, along with their three small children.
"I didn't want to be apart from them," Gonzalez said of the couple's decision to travel to Minnesota all together last week. "When you have a bad game, my personal opinion is, when I get home and see my kids, they change the whole day. They change my day. Sometimes you need to stay a bit away from baseball whenever you're going through a rough time. That was the main reason I decided to bring my kids."
It's an understandable decision, but not an easy one and, on the Twins, far from a unanimous one.
With the coronavirus surging all over the country, with the regular season reduced to nine weeks instead of six months, several players said they grappled with the decision. You know how the negotiations between MLB owners and players involved questions about logistics, travel, finances and especially safety, about avoiding COVID-19 and determining what happens if you can't?
Yeah, it was like that.
"It was a tough decision, and it's not one that you're exactly prepared to make," said Jake Odorizzi, father of two young sons who remain, with wife Carissa, at their home in Tampa, Fla. "There's a lot of back and forth."
Same with Gonzalez, whose daughter Eliana is enrolled in school for the first time this fall, creating another consideration for the parents. Noel at first advocated staying at their Houston home, he said, but was swayed by his commitment to staying safe and his desire to have his kids close by.
"I was doing the best I could to convince her because I didn't want to be here [alone]. It's tough to be just living baseball, given everything that we're living in right now," Gonzalez said. "To be by myself for these two and hopefully three months — at the end of the day, we decided to come here, the whole family."