I had similar problem in my Laptop Win10 VMware environment.

Issue scenario:
In the laptop running vmware ws 16 as host,  IP contact with guest VM (NAT connection) was lost whenever the Laptop was awaken after having entered sleep mode, e.g. during lunch hour.
Located the issue to vmhost adapter for VMnet8, of which related IPs (192.168.117...) apparently each time disappeared from routing table. 
Tired of having to go into the laptop's network settings and disable+enable VMnet8 each time this happened, I set up following

Workaround:
I created a minimal batchfile (.bat) with below few commands:

@Echo on
timeout /t 10
netsh interface set interface "VMware Network Adapter VMnet8" admin=DISABLED
timeout /t 10
netsh interface set interface "VMware Network Adapter VMnet8" admin=ENABLED

I may of course execute this manually by rightclicking the .bat-file and "run as admin"
But instead I opened Windows Task Scheduler, created a New Task.
I selected as Trigger: "On workstation unlock", and as Action: "Start a program" with path to above .bat-file.
I chose to let the task being run using user account: SYSTEM
In all, it makes the above commands execute anytime the laptop "wakes up from sleep".

Since then, the problem is gone. Coming back from lunch and logging back into the laptop, I always find the VMware Host->Guest communication working as needed, and the Guest responding successfully to ping.
Although not tested, I assume the same is applicable also when using the free VMware Player