NEWSLETTER
With Ken Rosenthal’s latest more or less matching Jeff Passan’s most realistic synthesis of the information he’s hearing, we can update with a current “most likely” version of the MLB season, should one occur. (Note that there is almost universal optimism on that front now.)
To be sure, neither Rosenthal nor Passan claim that anything is clearly on or off the table, but the information each appears to be receiving from around the game including some general thoughts I’ll discuss below. Read each article to get that sense for yourself, as I’m going to ahead and lay out the sense I’m getting.
The Arizona Plan is waning in popularity. The players never liked the idea of being quarantined away from their families, and you never got the sense that baseball officials were eager to say families would of course be permitted. There were a lot of reasons to like the plan as a launching point for the season – it preserves the possibility to stick to the schedule, and it’s probably the quickest way to start the season – but nobody seems to be touting it anymore. That’s both because it had issues, and also because I think more people are optimistic now about other approaches than they previously were.
A multi-city “hub” type plan is far more likely than the Arizona Plan, though the hubs might not be limited to only Arizona, Texas, and Florida initially – many more states may have opened things back up by the time MLB would be kicking off. So there could be four or five or six hubs. The schedule, and how you make it work (or rewrite the whole thing?), is a challenge here.
Thus, it’s likely that MLB is waiting as long as possible before deciding on a plan because it is hoping teams *can* simply start the regular season in their home parks when the time comes. You’ll note that even in Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot indicated games at Wrigley Field and G-Rate were possible as soon as this summer, albeit without fans.
Going that route would allow players to be at home with their families for the whole season, and would allow the league to keep its current schedule. If you went with a hub plan (as opposed to the Arizona Plan), you could not keep your original schedule, since teams would suddenly be playing against entirely different groups of clubs for a period of time at the start of the year. You would also still have the issues related to family relocation and quarantine.
Keeping the current schedule, I suspect, is very important to some owners, because it leaves open the possibility for limited fan attendance later in the season. Yankees President Randy Levine was pretty clear on that point, as surprising as it was to me. As we’ve discussed, testing and contact tracing would have to be extraordinary by that time for attendance – any attendance – to be feasible.
Contrary to the doom-sayers, the national trends on testing and caseload are starting to suggest it is *possible* that games could launch at home parks (without fans), so long as you’re not talking about launching any time soon. The league is going to have to get a deal in place and then also account for a lengthy (3-4 week) Spring Training Part Two in any case, so it’s not like a regular season opener before June is plausible anyway.
That timeline squares with the reopening guidelines even the more prudent states have started to unveil, and also squares with the federal phasing plan. The latter explicitly contemplates large sports stadiums opening up, and the former (that I’ve seen) are going to permit large business operations to resume so long as various precautions and procedures take place (all of which MLB would be doing anyway). Ohio, for example, has been one of the most aggressive states in undertaking lockdown protocols, and also one of the most conservative in allowing folks to go about regular activities – but even they contemplate general businesses reopening on May 4.
That is all to say, yes, we’re entering a world where playing sports without crowds is probably going to start to look perfectly plausible relative to other businesses that are getting underway. Could MLB start playing games all across the country without fans in a couple months? Yes. That’s possible.
But even that kind of rosy take needs to emphasize that testing still needs to expand significantly, and states would have to have suffered no severe “relapses” of caseload after they began opening in the coming weeks.
Both Rosenthal and Passan mention 80 to 100 games as the realistic range for the season. If a plan is negotiated with the players in May, and then involves Spring Training in June, you’d be talking about the regular season beginning in early July, and proceeding into October. If the bulk of the postseason occurred in November (warm-weather locations, likely), then you would have reasonable calendar space for 80 to 100 games and adequate rest.
In sum, virtually everyone attached to the game believes baseball will be played this year, and it looks increasingly likely that the timeline is going to be on the longer side, because baseball is holding out hope that games can simple begin at home parks on the “normal” schedule (no games until July, I’m guessing at the moment). That runs contrary to a competing goal of getting games on TV as soon as possible to take advantage of the sports vacuum, but everything right now is just about choosing the least horrible of a bunch of bad options.
As always, things change by the day, so all we can really say for certain is that, outside of a miracle treatment or absurdly early-arriving vaccine, we all just have to keep hoping for massive increases in testing, which will at least keep more options on the table.
