The Return of Baseball: How the Indianapolis Indians Held Their Ground Through COVID-19

The best way to describe the routines and commitments that come with planning and executing the minor league baseball season in downtown Indianapolis is with a wheel. One of those that you really need to put strength behind to manually get it going, it takes the contribution of every member in the organization to keep it spinning for approximately 70 home games that run from April into September.

For the Indianapolis Indians – and all those in Minor League Baseball, for that matter – the wheel stopped turning on the afternoon of March 12, 2020, and it took the combined resiliency of the entire front office to get it moving again in preparation for 2021.

“As we crank that wheel and get it going for the start of the Indians season in ’21, it might start a little more slowly and have a few more creaks… but every department plays a big part in that wheel,” Indians President and General Manager Randy Lewandowski said. “I think everybody is anxious, excited to get back to doing what we do.”

It’s a story that’s been told over and over, and if you’re a sports fan you probably know it by heart. The night of Wednesday, March 11, Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz tested positive for COVID-19 and set off a chain reaction that led to the NBA being suspended minutes later and the rest of the sports world shutting down the following day.

The Pittsburgh Pirates and all of Grapefruit League operations in Florida continued that Thursday – a players’ account of which you can read here – but one-by-one as the lights flicked off on different sporting events, both current and upcoming, the inevitable inched closer.

Lewandowski, who was in attendance for the Pirates 1:05 p.m. ET first pitch start in Bradenton, Fla. that afternoon, describes a “buzz” that went through the crowd about five minutes before game time. Major League Baseball had suspended spring training operations, effective at 4 p.m. ET.

Two hours after that initial news blast, Lewandowski received an email from the Minor League Baseball office mirroring what MLB had said: the MiLB season was now pushed back two weeks.

“It was just kind of an eerie feeling from that point forward, and still didn’t quite know what it meant,” Lewandowski said. “That’s when the wheel started to turn in terms of, yeah, this is going to hit home and have a major effect on what we do.”

At that point in the calendar year, the organization had already been moving at a steady pace. The 2020 schedule was released even before the curtains closed on the 2019 season, and for most the end of one season only meant the start of another.

As three of the top four working members of the organization traveled to what they thought would be a typical work week in the Pirates spring training home of Bradenton, Assistant General Manager of Tickets and Operations Matt Guay was on point back home at Victory Field. The front office, at least through the early hours on Thursday when things didn’t seem as imminent, continued as normal.

Normal, however, is a relative term even in the rising of a pandemic age. When the clock hit 3:30 that afternoon, the contents of the Victory Field Hot Corner Gift Shop were all pushed to the side, and those working in the office stood in a circle as the reality of the situation slowly but surely sunk in.

“It was surreal,” Guay said. “You knew something was up, but you weren’t quite sure exactly what it meant for everybody. I don’t think anyone thought at that point that there was a season cancellation coming… from that standpoint, we didn’t really grasp the severity of what we were getting ourselves into.”

Before news from Major League Baseball had even broke, Guay gathered the directors of various departments together to cancel the upcoming Victory Field events out of an abundance of caution. In the following hours, that cohesive group of front office employees became vital to the communication efforts from Indianapolis to Florida.

“Once you decided how you were going to move on one thing, then something else came up,” Guay said. “And it probably forced us to make decisions rather quickly because those guys were [in Florida]. We knew, ‘Alright, we need to make a call now. That’s what we’re going to do, let’s do it.’ On some level, I think for me there was some sense of peace there and trying to deal with that stuff.”

The difficulties that arose from remote communication that day, as news continued to pile on each hour Thursday and into Friday, was nothing compared to what would be coming around the corner. By that following Monday, Victory Field was shut down and the front office – save those who were working diligently to clean and sanitize every inch of the ballpark – began working from home.

For most, the process of taking work home wasn’t the difficult thing to adjust to. Besides now commuting between rooms instead of along highways, the lack of face-to-face interaction and in-person meetings meant that digital communication efforts were of the utmost importance.

“Whether it was [Microsoft] Teams, how quickly we needed to set up meetings, how reoccurring we needed to have meetings to talk through everything, across the board I think the communication really has been something that we’ve improved upon because we had to,” Director of Marketing and Promotions Kim Stoebick said.

Meetings, now digital, turned into brainstorming sessions for how to move forward with little to no idea on if or when things would go back to normal. As the days and weeks began to bleed together while stay-at-home orders were in place, the season delay turned from a two-week hiatus to a hanging question mark.

Within the Indians front office, two plans were lined out: one with professional baseball, and one without. The latter would give the organization a chance to put together events that it had been considering for years, while also working diligently to fill the calendar with as many events as possible and complying with COVID-19 guidelines.

“Whatever happened in the first 48 to 72 hours escaped me pretty quick because we just had to move forward as quick as we could,” Director of Tickets for Premium Services and Events Kerry Vick said. “We’re a baseball business and we had to convert to an event center, relatively speaking, overnight.”

Before COVID-19 was even on the global radar, the Indians had been planning to expand their reach beyond the scope of baseball. Following the 2019 season, Victory Field underwent renovations to add the Elements Financial Club, a premium tickets and events space that would transform the ballpark into more of a year-round facility.

With the addition of the club came the onboarding of a Stadium Events Manager in March to plan and facilitate those events outside of baseball. Very quickly, the scope of that job changed.

“We were already kind of gearing up for a new world of events here, this just accelerated everything,” Vick said. “We realized, each month at a time, that baseball wasn’t coming back right away, and we needed to figure out what the next steps were.

“We probably explored dozens of event ideas, and when you’re in the brainstorming stages you do probably have to eliminate 90 percent of them, but you’ve got to have a lot of darts to throw at the wall just to see where you find that sweet spot.”

It took every member of the front office to budge the wheel in those first months without professional baseball. Indianapolis Indians Charities kicked off the new calendar with a monthlong COVID-19 relief campaign in May and small-scale private and community events followed.

After months of planning and predicting the inevitable, Minor League Baseball officially announced the cancellation of its 2020 season on June 30 with plans to go forward with an MLB season and alternate training sites already in place. For the Indians, the planning paid off.

“It’s interesting in times of challenge and difficulty, how the people you work and associate with come together,” Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer Bruce Schumacher said. “In some ways it would have been easy for people to be down, but everyone showed up and pitched in to keep Victory Field active.”

With the organization already immersed in the world of digital marketing, it launched the Victory Field social media brand in late June to work in tandem with the existing Indianapolis Indians brand. Those Facebook, Twitter and Instagram channels would soon become a hub for everything the Indians organization had planned for the upcoming months, without the Indians team being on the field.

“I felt like we were constantly busy, which helped,” Stoebick said. “Just constantly trying to think of new ideas, new ways to bring in revenue, new ways to market.”

On July 16, just over two weeks after the possibility of a minor league season returning to the Circle City was erased, the Victory Field gates were opened for its first public baseball game since August 31, 2019.

Grand Park College Summer League games at Victory Field kicked off what would have been the second half of the Indians baseball season, and the public events portion of the calendar only ramped up from there.

“Those college games where we had 1,000 fans in here, it felt weird, but it was just nice to see people at the ballpark,” Director of Field Operations Joey Stevenson said. “We always wonder what it would be like as a groundskeeper and not have any games, and it’s honestly terrible because what’s most enjoyable is seeing the game and everybody enjoying the ballpark.”

Over the course of the summer, Victory Field would play host to baseball games, an auto show, multiple movie nights and a watch party for the hometown Pacers’ efforts in the NBA Playoffs.

One of the biggest and most creative events turned the field into a golf course for The Links at Victory Field. Hosted over two weekends in August and October, the Indianapolis Indians staff, from top to bottom, put in over 1,500 hours at the ballpark that led to the event’s success – not including the hours of preparation and execution, from selling tickets to branding and marketing the event.

“[The Links] was the most fun and interesting and challenging,” Vick said. “It was really neat to see the whole staff get together, team up and attack it, from the planning to having Randy [Lewandowski] manning a [tee] box for a six-hour shift.”

The type of collaboration seen throughout the summer in every aspect of what the organization went through, whether it was internally being transparent when information became available on COVID-19 and the status of the minor league season to the strength in numbers to pull off both public and private events, gives the Indians an edge entering the 2021 season.

Things still aren’t back to a 2019 level of normal, with the latest jam in the wheel coming with the four-week delay to the 2021 Triple-A baseball season. However, having that experience from March 2020 on has changed the mindset of the front office for the better.

“A few years ago, we talked about how our organization can turn into silos, where you’re in your lane and doing your thing, but you’re not really collaborating as much and aren’t thinking about how the decisions that you make for your position affects [the organization as a whole],” Stoebick said. “I think going through this pandemic, those silos have had to come down because we have had to work as a team to survive.”

Now, every member of the organization is focused and working on moving the wheel toward May 11, Opening Day in Victory Field’s 25th anniversary season.

When that date does arrive – despite all the nervousness and anxiety that comes with putting on events and an entire 60-game slate – so will relief.

“There’ll be a joy or a happiness that envelops everybody on staff,” Lewandowski said. “And we’ll welcome what we would have considered to be the everyday challenges or headaches of the weather, pulling tarp or any other glitch we might have in the normal course of operations.

“I think more than anything we now know that nothing is guaranteed. Now we’ll have an appreciation for what we do and what we provide. I think we’ve always had it; it’ll just feel a little more special.”