NEWSLETTER
There are now exactly 100 days until April 1, which is supposed to be the start of the 2021 regular season. No, that is not an April Fools reference. It is literally the day MLB currently expects to open its season.
Not too many people around the game actually expect that, though.
There are so many threads all tied up together right now in baseball that it can be nearly impossible to keep them appropriately separated in a post like this. You’ve got free agency, you’ve got team finances crushed by last year, you’ve got the upcoming CBA, you’ve got the state of the pandemic now, you’ve got vaccines rolling out to uncertain timing, you’ve got Spring Training scheduled less than two months from now, you’ve got fan attendance questions, you’ve got season length and timing questions, you’ve got current CBA questions about the impact on the upcoming season, you’ve got continued acrimony between the players and the league, and I could go on.
Suffice to say, there are so many moving parts right now – so many interrelated topics – that almost nothing can be discussed independently.
For example, Jayson Stark wanted to survey folks in baseball to get their best guesses on when the season could start and how long it would be, and while he achieved his goal, the write-up necessarily involves almost all of those topics above.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t read the article for all that stuff, too – you should! – but if you want to try to isolate what is arguably the most important subtopic to you as a fan, Stark did a good job in his tweet about the article:
ICYMI How many games will the 2021 baseball season be? And when will it start?
I took an informal survey of 25 baseball people. Almost none of them said 162/April 1.
Here’s why.https://t.co/IRHtOjLW5N pic.twitter.com/hRTLbDNTNy
— Jayson Stark (@jaysonst) December 22, 2020
For all those complicated reasons, as Stark discusses, almost no one in the game right now expects the regular season to open as scheduled on April 1, nor for the season to last the scheduled 162 games.
With the start date, the conversation is relatively uncomplicated in isolation: the pandemic is in its worst fits right now, and we are unlikely to see wide distribution of vaccines until sometime in March/April/May. That being the case, starting Spring Training in mid-February would mean stringent protocols again, heightened risk, and no (or severely limited) fans. The league and players demonstrated this past season that it can be done, but if waiting a month or two changes things in a fundamental way? There will be a push to do so.
The length of season, however, is where things get so much more complicated, as we’ve discussed. The players will want their full slate of 162 games for compensation reasons, and the owners will want something less than that (presuming the portion they want is the portion that can be attended by fans – also for financial reasons). There are expanded playoffs and other money-adjacent rules to be negotiated, so I’m stupidly hopeful that a resolution can be put together that properly compensates players, but also bumps the season back to, say, May 1, and chops off about 20 games if necessary.
If that resolution is coming, however, it needs to come quickly. Players will begin heading to Spring Training sites as soon as early January (or they’ll want to, at least), to prepare for Spring Training, itself. If we’re going to see Spring Training bumped back a month+, it’d be ideal to get that settled in the next few weeks.
