It’s been a disaster of a negotiation for the better part of a month – on display for everyone to follow in realtime – but it may finally be reaching a conclusion.
Last night, Jeff Passan of ESPN tweeted “Major League Baseball has asked the MLB Players Association if players can report to camp by July 1 and will sign off on health-and-safety protocols. The union has been asked to respond by 5 pm Tuesday. In order words: MLB is planning on a season.” This would be a 60-game season beginning the weekend of July 24-26.
Baseball is (almost) (maybe) (sort of) (hopefully) (please make it true and spare everyone on this website any more talk about labor fights) back. pic.twitter.com/xlXFFVs9rC
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) June 23, 2020
The bottom line is that for the first time, we have good news. The pressure from the public became too much for the owners and players to ignore. After last Wednesday’s ordeal which began with Jon Heyman reporting that an agreement was on the verge of being completed, only to be publicly denied by the MLB Players Association, things had hit rock-bottom. People have already been fed up with the billionaire owners crying poor but I think fans had actually gotten a little tired of the players schtick, which was “when-and-where” just two days before. If they were so eager to start the season, why turn down a 60 game fully pro-rated season? That’s when I started to question who exactly is calling the shots here?
At the end of the day, though, I am a die-hard baseball fan and I don’t need to know how the sausage is made, just give me an Opening Day date and show me a schedule and I will be back fully embracing the game like I always have.
These people that say they’re fed up and done with Major League Baseball because of labor negotiations are ludicrous to me. If baseball is an escape from reality and it entertains you, how does some time away from it not make you miss it? Once the games begin, I have to imagine many of the fans that tweeted things like that will change their tune. We haven’t had a live Major League game since October 30. At this point, with all the negativity in our world – I think I physically need it.
Now, as many people have stated – the common enemy is the virus. Once the seasons begins on July 24 or 25 or 26, it’s back to monitoring the infection rate and the clusters. We’ve already heard about the Phillies being effected by this, so what happens if the starting pitcher of a Major League game gets scratched the night before a game? What if he was with his teammates the day of his test before getting isolated? Could that mean a team is at a competitive advantage over the team that has to use an emergency starter? What happens when a couple superstars have to miss two weeks of a 60-game season and it makes the season more illegitimate? The reality is that there’s a real chance the season winds up getting wiped out before its completion. They originally were concerned about a second-wave of the virus in October, but we are seeing that states like Texas, Florida, South Carolina and California are just now getting hit with their first wave of the virus so who knows what next week is going to look like let alone October.
I don’t have these answers and I wouldn’t want to be the person in charge of making the decisions, because the virus is not behind us. Business is business and they will push forward to make their bottom line more palatable but there will be plenty of people outraged by putting profits ahead of health and safety and make no mistake, if they were truly concerned about health and safety there would be no season amidst a global pandemic.
But the country does need a positive outlet and baseball is very much still part of the fabric of our nation so I am glad it’s (appears to be) back.
Here’s a top five of things I miss about the season and am looking forward to.
- Healthy debates – baseball has always been about numbers and bragging rights among fan bases. After what our nation has witnessed in 2020 already, it’s pretty clear baseball debates pales in comparison to the severity of some of the problems occuring. When I was a teenager I would get in heated debates about the Mets and Yankees or Phillies. They would get personal and angry. Now I realize they were meaningless. But I still miss the good-natured arguments of who’s the better player, especially in the midst of an MVP race.
- League Leaders – The Athletic did a piece on what the shortened season may mean for historic numbers such as batting average. What if a player hits .407 during a 60-game season? Will it be in the record book with an asterisk? Will it be ignored altogether? I have no idea. But in terms of the counting numbers, it will be bizarre to see someone lead the league with 25 home runs or 10 wins or 100 strikeouts. Also, when it comes to pitching rate statistics like ERA and K/9 we could definitely see something wild like a sub 1.00 ERA and 19 K/9 because pitchers have done that over abbreviated portions of the season. Jake Arrieta in 2015 comes to mind and Jack Flaherty last year both had ridiculous stretches that were probably unsustainable over a full season but now we’ll pay attention if that’s the full season.
- Watching Live Games at a Bar – This is something that cannot be simulated by watching old games on YouTube or MLB Network during quarantine. This is only achieved through watching actual games in real-time. The emotions of feeling something as it plays out for the first time, not re-living it 20 years later in a documentary. Whether you’re watching your favorite team, rooting for a player on your fantasy team, betting on a game or just watching it for the love of the game, there’s a reason baseball brought in close to $11 billion in 2019 and it’s because die-hard fans still consume it and crave more.
- A Chaotic Pennant Race – One of the beauties of a 162-game season is that it is a marathon and not a sprint. The best team in April rarely is the team that wins the World Series. Last year, for example, the Mariners started out 13-2 and finished with 94 losses while the Nationals were 19-31 after 50 games so anything is possible in a 60-game season. As someone that doesn’t root for the Yankees or Dodgers, it will be interesting to see how they manage the pressure of being the World Series favorites in a shortened season. Eno Sarris wrote an article that studied how the length of the season correlates to who the best team is and essentially anything less than 80 games is not a strong correlation so we are definitely likely to see a surprise team sneak into the playoffs and possibly capture the pennant.
- Going to A Game – The last baseball game I went to was March 10 between Stony Brook and Iona. The last MLB game I went to was in September on a family vacation to Arizona. I almost forgot what it feels like to drive to a game, see the stadium in the distance, park, walk inside, experience everything that a stadium has to offer and then actually watch the game. If the season was cancelled, it would’ve meant 18 months without live baseball. I’m not comfortable living in that world. So bravo Jeff Passan for believing in it from the jump, when it became popular to say ‘cancel the season’ or ‘baseball is dead.’
While I understand if people are sick of the greediness or just focused on other things in the world, I’m still one of those people that needs baseball to make a living and also to keep breathing.
