As the Giants start to arrive back in their hometowns, they're figuring out on the fly how to stay in shape for a baseball season on pause due to the coronavirus pandemic. Some are lucky enough to have indoor cages or their own pitching mounds.

Others are finding more creative solutions. Sam Coonrod posted a video on his Instagram story showing that he was throwing pitches into a net on a grass field.

Mike Krukow can relate, considering what he did in 1981 when he dealt with a similar situation. Krukow, then a starter for the Chicago Cubs, took to local parks when a strike shut the game down for nearly two months. On the latest Giants Insider Podcast, he told the story of how he would give lessons with Bill Buckner before facing the All-Star first baseman in simulated games. That's how the two stayed sharp, and it helped Krukow stay afloat financially.

After four full seasons, he had just started to make good money, but he still wasn't able to be fully comfortable during a work stoppage. Krukow said he was making $125,000 that year but he and his wife had bought a house and didn't really have any savings.

"(Buckner) called me up and goes, 'Hey listen, let's do this. Let's put on clinics throughout the Chicago area,' " Krukow recalled. " 'We'll charge kids $5 a kid and we'll come in here and we'll give clinics.' We did. We went around to parks and it was kind of word of mouth advertisement, but we would get 100 kids there and we would go through a clinic for four hours.

"Can you imagine as a kid listening to Bill Buckner talk about hitting? He was fantastic. We would talk about hitting skills, they fielded balls and fly balls, they would hit. He and I both would throw live BP and whatnot for them.

"When that was all done and all the kids went home, I would get on the mound and Buckner and I would have at it. We had a sack of balls and it was spirited. I was knocking him back. He was one of the best hitters in the league. We'd go at it, and I would pitch probably the equivalent of 50 pitches, but it was all out. It was for basically who paid for the beer after the workout. That's how we stayed in shape."

The plan worked well. Krukow gave up one run on two hits in six innings his first start back. He had a 2.49 ERA the rest of the year, going 8-4. The matchups also helped Buckner, who had won the batting title the year before. He hit .310 the rest of the way.

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This break is a much different situation, of course. Players are practicing social distancing and aren't supposed to have organized workouts. Krukow said he's sure they have plans in place to stay in shape, and they'll need to, because you never know when the season will restart. He experienced that in 1981.

"We had a couple workouts, played a home-and-away with the White Sox, and then it was like 'Ok, let's go.'" he recalled. "I had done a lot of throwing during those 51 days. I was ready to go."