There’s just one guarantee as Major League Baseball aims to wedge an 80-plus game schedule and expanded playoffs into a pandemic-driven four-month…
There’s just one guarantee as Major League Baseball aims to wedge an 80-plus game schedule and expanded playoffs into a pandemic-driven four-month window: Roughly half the season is gone forever.
Some franchises have pointed to 2020 for several years as the moment their plans would coalesce. Others decided, in a more impetuous fashion, to go all-in on this season. And dozens of players will lose wages, statistics, records and indelible pieces of their legacies they can never get back.
But like everything amid the fallout from COVID-19, some will lose more than others.
Provided health and financial concerns are mitigated, everyone will get a shot at the 2020 World Series. But here are the teams and individuals who will most feel the gut punch that comes with a lost half-season of baseball:
Theirs was to be a temporary marriage, almost certainly: Betts, the best right fielder in the game and 2018 AL MVP, and his new club joining forces to end L. A.’s increasingly frustrating title drought before Mookie vaulted into the $300 million players’ club via free agency.
Now, they are joined at the hip in trying to make the best of a situation that quickly turned sour.
Yes, it’s still possible the Dodgers gave up three young players to the Boston Red Sox and won’t see Betts take an at-bat for them due to the novel coronavirus. That alone casts a pall over what would have been something resembling a superteam in more conventional circumstances.
And it’s also a bummer for Betts’ fortunes. Adjusting to a new league is a pain, anyway, and 80 to 100 games allows little runway to overcome a slow start. In moving from east to west, a geographically-based schedule means he’ll be facing almost entirely unfamiliar pitchers and playing in largely foreign ballparks. Betts will still probably fare better in free agency than he would have entertaining extension offers from the Red Sox, but will face a winter in which franchises will cry poor (some of them justifiably) due to big losses in 2020-21.
