When Major League Baseball games begin Saturday night, eight teams will not be in action due to players testing positive for coronavirus. The COVID-19…
When Major League Baseball games begin Saturday night, eight teams will not be in action due to players testing positive for coronavirus.
The COVID-19 pandemic has already caused stops, starts and headaches in the young, truncated season, with two teams — the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals — experiencing an outbreak. On Saturday, the Cardinals-Brewers game was postponed again, moving Milwaukee’s home opener to be pushed to a doubleheader Sunday.
It’s certainly not the way MLB drew it up when Commissioner Rob Manfred instituted a 60-game season to be completed in 66 days. And although the season is more than a week old, questions about how MLB will make it to the World Series in October continue to pile up.
“We are playing,” Manfred told ESPN. “The players need to be better, but I am not a quitter in general and there is no reason to quit now. We have had to be fluid, but it is manageable.”
Below, we do our best to ask, and try to answer, the essential questions MLB must address for the 2020 season to forge ahead.
For some teams, such as the Marlins, the numbers are not adding up. They must make up seven games, which means playing 57 games in 56 days assuming they’re able to resume their season Monday. The Phillies (seven games), Nationals and Blue Jays (three each) all have at least one full series to make up.
The season was already a condensed sprint; it’s only going to get tighter.
Television drives much of this bus, and that’s where the big revenue remains for almost all interested parties — the networks, the league, team owners and, to a lesser degree, the players.
