Red Sox reportedly banned Fortnite from clubhouse - MLB

Update (5/2/19): Price and manager Alex Cora both shot down Bradford’s report, Pete Abraham of The Boston Globe reports.

Fortnite is among the most popular video games now. As of this writing, over 148,000 people are watching people play the game on Twitch.tv, a popular streaming website. That ranks third behind Grand Theft Auto V and League of Legends. Fortnite is popular among people in general, but also among Major League Baseball players. Trevor May, for example, pitches for the Twins, but when he’s not doing that, he streams as part of the esports team Luminosity Gaming. The Phillies had a clubhouse issue last season as players were reportedly playing Fortnite in the clubhouse during games, which resulted in Carlos Santana smashing a TV with a bat.

Some members of the Red Sox are big fans of Fortnite, including David Price, Chris Sale, J.D. Martinez, and Xander Bogaerts, among others. They were so into it that some players had video gaming monitors installed in their lockers in the Red Sox clubhouse last year. That is no longer the case, WEEI’s Rob Bradford reports. There is no more Fortnite in the Red Sox clubhouse.

Pitcher Nathan Eovaldi said, “I haven’t seen it this year. Usually everybody had it set up in their lockers. But I haven’t seen it.”

The defending World Series champion Red Sox are off to a slow start, currently sitting in fourth place in the AL East with a 13-17 record. Things have gotten better lately, with the club having won seven of its last 11 games. Eovaldi said, “I think there is a time and place for that, too. Maybe if we were doing a little better maybe we would be doing it, but you can’t be losing and playing Fortnite in the clubhouse.”

Bradford notes that players are now filling the down time with crossword puzzles, card games, and dominoes.

Though video games are thoroughly mainstream now, they still get a bad rap for causing all kinds of problems. For example, people still mistakenly link video games to violence. In sports, video games are often a scapegoat for a team’s struggles. A winning team won’t have its gaming ways become a narrative, but a bad or collapsing team will, which is why the Phillies’ story from last year was so juicy. They were far from the only team with Fortnite-obsessed players, however. And players can be just as inattentive listening to audiobooks, watching YouTube, binging TV shows on Netflix, or doing Sudoku. On the other hand, video gaming can be wonderful as a team bonding exercise. Gaming is also shown to improve a player’s ability to think creatively and critically. Generally, video games can reduce stress and anxiety as well. Hopefully, teams across the league don’t follow suit and blindly ban video games from the clubhouse while keeping all of the other enticing distractions.

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The first thing that Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman thinks about when he wakes up each morning is how the club, stuck in what seems like an interminable rebuild, will play on that particular day.

Not where they will play four or five years down the road.

Yet given the modest expectations for a team that lost nearly 100 games a year ago, it makes sense many Royals fans are just as interested – quite possibly more so – in the plans for a downtown ballpark than whether infielder Bobby Witt Jr. can double down on his brilliant rookie season or pitcher Brady Singer can truly become a staff ace.

That’s why Sherman’s second thought probably moves to the downtown ballpark, too.

“This is a huge decision, and I look at it as maybe the most important decision we’ll make as long as we have the privilege of stewarding this team,” Sherman said before the Royals held a final workout Wednesday ahead of opening day. “I’m probably as anxious as you to get moving on that, but it’s a complicated process.”

The Royals have called Kauffman Stadium home since the sister to Arrowhead Stadium, the home of the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, opened 50 years ago next month.

And while most stadiums are replaced because they have become outdated, the unique, space-aged look of Kauffman Stadium – built during an era in which teams trended toward impersonal, multisport concrete donuts for their homes – remains beloved by Royals fans and visitors alike.

The problem is that despite numerous renovations over the years, the very concrete holding the ballpark together has begun to crumble in places. The cost simply to repair and maintain the ballpark has become prohibitive.

So with the decision essentially made for them to build an entirely new stadium, the Royals revealed plans to build an entire development in the same mold of The Battery Atlanta, where the Braves built Truist Park, and the Ballpark Village in St. Louis, where the new Busch Stadium is merely the centerpiece of a whole entertainment district.

No site has been secured, but several of the most promising are in downtown Kansas City, where the Power & Light District along with T-Mobile Center have spearheaded a successful era of urban renewal.

Sherman has said that private funds would cover the majority of the stadium cost and the entire village, each carrying a price tag of about $1 billion.

But if any public funding will be used, as it was to build and maintain Kauffman Stadium, then it would need to be voted upon, and the earliest that it could show up on a ballot would be August.

“You look at Atlanta, they took some raw ground – they started with 85 acres – and that has been a complete home run,” said Sherman, who purchased the Royals in August 2019, shortly before the pandemic wreaked havoc on team finances.

“This is one of the reasons we want to do this: That’s helped the Braves become more competitive,” Sherman said of the vast potential for increased revenue for one of the smallest-market teams in baseball. “They have locked up and extended the core of their future, and the Braves are in a great position from a baseball standpoint.”

So perhaps the first two thoughts Sherman has each day – about performance and the future – are one and the same.

When it comes to the team itself, the Royals were largely quiet throughout the winter, though that was by design.

Rather than spending heavily on free agents that might help them win a few more games, they decided to stay the course with a promising young roster in the hopes that the development of those players would yield better results.

In fact, Sherman said, the club has been discussing extensions for some of the Royals’ foundational pieces – presumably Witt, who was fourth in voting for AL rookie of the year, and Singer, who was 10-5 with a 3.23 ERA last season.

“We’re having conversations about that as we speak,” Sherman said. “We have a number of young players that we’re trying to evaluate and we’re talking to their representatives about what might work.”

Just because the Royals’ roster largely looks the same, that doesn’t mean nothing has changed. The Royals fired longtime general manager Dayton Moore in September and moved J.J. Picollo to the role, then fired manager Mike Matheny in October and replaced him with longtime Indians and Rays coach Matt Quatraro.

Sherman said the new voices created a palpable energy in spring training that he hopes carries into the regular season.

“When we acquired the team, we had three primary objectives,” Sherman said. “One was to win more games; we’re working on that. The second was to secure the future; that’s what (the stadium) is. And the third was to do good in the community.

“But the first priority,” he said, “is really the on-field product. That’s what really lifts everything else up.”