Chicago Cubs: What players have been up to since baseball got postponed

Let’s use social media to check in on what the Chicago Cubs players have been up to since the MLB season got postponed.

All us Chicago Cubs fans are out here waiting for baseball. Someday, it will return when all the craziness of the present-day situation calms down, and we get that coveted return to normalcy.

When MLB indefinitely postponed the beginning of the season on March 12 and all the fun novelties of the 2020 baseball season got put on hold, Cubs players had the option to remain at Chicago’s Spring training facility in Arizona, go to Chicago, or go to their hometowns.

We’re going to use the player’s social media accounts to get a glimpse at what some of the Cubs players have been up to in the two weeks since the baseball season was put on hold.

Chicago Cubs’ Willson Contreras has a ‘creative’ idea

A once in a decade creative idea.

Willson Contreras has won the quarantine so far with this resourceful way of still getting his batting practice in for the day even without a batting cage (after all, we can’t all be Kris Bryant and have an at-home full set up batting cage, right?).

Some questions for Willson:

1). What kind of ball is he using? It makes a bit of a crack when it contacts the bat, and it’s flying with too much velocity to be a whiffle ball or a Nerf ball, right?

2) His makeshift home plate is just feet away from a car in one of the videos. If he shanks the ball a bit to his right when he makes contact with the ball, it’s shattering a window if it has any sort of hardness at all. So it has to be a softer ball then, right?

3). Contreras can hit a baseball a long way (remember the 491-foot dinger in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series in 2017 off of poor Alex Wood). There are two different videos of Contreras taking batting practice with the Nerf gun.

It looks like he’s playing at his house in both videos. How isolated is his house from other houses/how big is his backyard for him to feel comfortable hitting those balls and not worrying about breaking anything?

Chicago Cubs’ Jason Heyward is donating $200k 

Soft-spoken, good guy Jason Heyward is using the coronavirus layoff to make a difference in the world.

Last week, the Golden Glover announced he’s donating $200,000 to COVID-19 relief efforts in Chicago. He divided the donations into two categories. One hundred thousand dollars of the gift will go towards M.A.S.K, which is an organization that gathers supplies and food for those affected by the virus. The other half of Heyward’s donation is going to the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

Chicago Cubs’ Anthony Rizzo is lending a helping hand

The Cubs’ first baseman has an incredible foundation, and by the looks of his Twitter account, the hiatus from baseball has given him even more time to do great work.

On Tuesday, his foundation donated a bunch of meals to Lurie Children’s Hospital staff.

On Thursday, he plugged one of his favorite restaurants in Florida (Runyon’s), encouraging his vast Twitter following to order carryout from them to help them get through the difficult time (restaurants are closed to dine-in because of the coronavirus). He did the same thing for restaurants in Chicago.

Chicago Cubs’ Jason Kipnis is enjoying his dog

The Chicago native Jason Kipnis in his first season with the Chicago Cubs, is relegated to quarantine workouts like the rest of us and is hanging out with his adorable dog.

In case you didn’t get the memo, Rizzo also has an adorable wiener dog named Kevin, who is becoming a social media celebrity. Kevin has got some face time on his owner’s social media accounts recently as well (although it was before baseball got postponed).

https://www.instagram.com/p/B9HlPaqlqD9/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Chicago Cubs’ Ian Happ refuses to smile…ever

Ian Happ is still stubbornly refusing to smile. Since he’s not around teammates anymore and he’s not going to tell on himself, he’s probably sneaking a few smiles here and there that are going undetected by the rest of the world outside of a few trusted confidants.

The Cubs way-too-serious center fielder is keeping himself relaxed and mentally healthy through meditation according to his social media accounts.

Many of the Chicago Cubs players are keeping it pretty low key while they wait out the global pandemic (or they just aren’t about posting every aspect of their lives on social media). But with no baseball insight, it’s still kind of fun to check in on our favorite players and see what they have been up to.

Weathering this global pandemic as safely as possible is of utmost priority right now. It sucks that baseball can’t start until this happens. But it’s our reality now, and we just have to make the best of it.

Someday, the gates will open again at Wrigley Field. Hopefully, that sometimes is sooner rather than later for the sanity of us all.