Detroit Tigers decided to hold training camp at Comerica Park. Here's why

The Detroit Tigers will be holding training camp at Comerica Park beginning Wednesday.

The Tigers would have rather trained at their spring training facilities in Lakeland, Florida, which offers five more baseball fields and much more space than the 20-year-old stadium in downtown Detroit, but the situation simply wasn’t feasible.

With an increase in novel coronavirus cases in Florida — and per Major League Baseball’s recommendation to train within driving distance of a team’s home stadium — the Tigers will make the best of an unprecedented situation.

“The logistics is very difficult,” general manager Al Avila said, noting that some of the team’s plans have yet to be finalized. “To get 60 guys work in there, it’s a difficult task but it’s doable and we feel we have a great plan.”

The Tigers will utilize both big-league clubhouses at Comerica Park and the auxiliary clubhouse. The team will implement a staggered workout schedule: Morning, afternoon and evening.

The Tigers considered a plan with 40 players in Detroit and 20 at the team’s Triple-A facility in Toledo, but logistics won out: With the kind of uniformed personnel necessary to conduct intersquad games, everyone needed to be in one spot.

MLB is allowing up to 20 players at a team’s alternate facility.

“We kicked around having 40 players in Detroit and 20 players in Toledo, but at the same time, to really get something done, particularly intersquad games, we’re going to need everybody,” Avila said. “So it would have been bringing players back-and-forth and at the end of the day, we felt it quite frankly made a lot more sense to have everybody in Detroit for spring training and then once we’re ready to break camp, send the 30 players to Toledo on the taxi squad for the next season.”

The Tigers must submit their 20-man taxi-squad roster — non-roster players — by Sunday night. Three players from the taxi squad will be allowed to travel with the team on the road, Avila said.

It is unclear whether the Tigers’ workouts will be open to the public.

Contact Anthony Fenech at afenech@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @anthonyfenech. Read more on the Detroit Tigers and sign up for our Tigers newsletter.