If we get any baseball, here’s how it should look
Major League Baseball is exploring all of its options as far as getting a season going, and good for them for doing it. An organization has to do its due diligence in a situation like this and consider everything, whether it’s an Arizona biodome or all spring training sites or “Fight Island.”
There’s nothing wrong there. And because we’re so starved for sports content, the Jeff Passans and company seize on to any bit of leak related to ideas of starting up and run with them, and then the Twitters grab it and it becomes “MLB to play games on the moon, rover to serve as all-time pitcher” or whatever. Every last bit of it is predictable and understandable.
I also think it’s all futile. I have trouble envisioning a scenario where there is baseball before 2021, and if I were in charge of MLB, I would be devoting a big chunk of my efforts toward simply making sure that goes off logically (and frankly I bet a lot of their efforts are going that way), and anything you get earlier than that is gravy.
Trying for something in May seems like a good way to disappoint a lot of people. Heck, June seems the same way. I think the best we can reasonably hope is a half-season that starts in July.
So! I’m helpful, and I’ve drawn up what I think is the best hope for a season that would start then. First point: The 30-team, best-of-seven series tournament would be fun as hell, and it is an absolute non-starter. Teams are going to need a few weeks of build-up to be ready for any sort of season, and telling a thousand players to ramp up their training only for 14 teams to be have their seasons end in no more than seven games (some as few as four) just won’t happen. Even if you work out a loser’s bracket or something, there’s just no logical way for the whole season to be a tournament, fun as that might be.
This is the next best thing:
July 14: All-Star Game
The All-Star Game was originally meant to be, and always should have been, a showcase of the game’s best players, not a showcase of the players who had the best Aprils. Let’s make it that. A training season in June (yes, assuming that’s possible) with exhibition games and such. That all ends July 12. On July 14, an All-Star team of players voted entirely by the fans (or almost entirely; 25 or so players on each side voted on by the fans, MLB fills out the last ~9 slots) plays an exhibition game. Every team is represented, just like normal. The teams don’t go all-out to win — pitchers are capped at an inning, maybe two, for example — but the biggest names still play most of the game. Baseball gets the entire world to itself on that day, give the fans the best the game has to offer.
July 16: Regular season starts
Teams play a 72-game regular season that starts Thursday, July 16 and runs through Wednesday, Sept. 30. That’s five games a week, every week, plus six extra games to fit in. So teams would get every Monday and every Thursday off except that July 16 opener and five others over the course of two and a half months.
Teams get 30-man rosters with a max of 16 pitchers. You play eight games against your divisional opponents and four games against all the other teams in your league. No tiebreaker games, no end-of-season weather makeups; we work out a tiebreaker system like football’s and accept that some teams only get to 69, 68 games. If you can fit a makeup game on a Monday or Thursday you have off, great; otherwise, it just doesn’t happen. On Sept. 30, the regular season is over, period.
As for fans, I don’t think we can reasonably have games with no fans whatsoever. If nothing else, the optics of “We can’t have fans in the stands lest they get sick, but let’s pack pro athletes getting sweaty all together and around their old coaches, old managers, old umpires. I think there has to be some fan presence. Is it doable that we have fans on a sparse basis? Game capacity at 10,000, no fans within two seats of one another unless they came together? Maybe smaller capacity, maybe more seats of separation, I’m not sure, but something to that effect. A quarter or so of the tickets from each game are reserved for essential workers.
October (and a teeny bit of November): 16-team playoff tournament
I could not want a 16-team MLB playoffs as the standard any less. But at the end of a 72-game season, where all the world wants is excitement? Sign me up right freaking now. Eight teams in each league make the playoffs, they get seeded 1-8. The structure:
Round 1: 16 teams, best-of-five, Oct. 1-6
Round 2: 8 teams, best-of-seven, Oct. 7-15
Round 3: 4 teams, best-of-seven, Oct. 17-25
Round 4: World Series! Best-of-seven, Oct. 27-Nov. 4
There are some obvious flaws there, starting with the simple fact that even this scenario might be wildly optimistic. (Seriously, read that. I’m just some guy who wants some clicks on his crappy site. That’s smart people saying smart things.) The playoff structure doesn’t allow for much in the way of cancellations or rainouts, or if you do accommodate those, you’re stretching deep into November. And what if we play seven games and then Joey Gallo tests positive? Do we shut down the whole thing? Or only the Rangers, and teams the Rangers have played, and teams who have played the teams the Rangers have played, and…? You get the idea.
Until there’s a vaccine, I’m not sure there are sports at all. Ultimately, I think Matt Sussman is right:
But absent that, my idea — embrace the game with an All-Star showcase, play a quick short season, don’t try to overload the schedule, and have a big 16-team tournament — is the best we’re gonna get. Hope for that. And don’t be surprised if you don’t get it.