Anticipating the season being cancelled any day now. Should have went the Arizona "bubble" route.
Anticipating the season being cancelled any day now. Should have went the Arizona "bubble" route.
Even without fans in the stands you still need 15 major-league caliber baseball infrastructures. Does Montana have 15? Does Wyoming? Does Idaho? A high-school baseball field isn't used every day for weeks at a time. Can they be made playable for multiple days? Dugouts? Locker rooms? Lighting? Mike Trout is too valuable to risk on a sub-standard baseball field.
And, yes the pro soccer leagues are a different thing. Soccer teams don't play every day, so you can make do with fewer fields.
I mean, baseball doesn't have to play every day. They could change their scheduling and/or reduce the number of games in order to be able to support some kind of baseball season amid the pandemic. Their failure to properly plan, and their apparent unwillingness to adjust/adapt are why they probably won't be able to finish out the season regardless.
Last edited by Acymetric; 07-30-2020 at 03:32 PM.
So, then what?; a 30-game schedule? Professional baseball's eternal rhythms have pretty much been shredded anyway. Do it like the NCAA baseball tournament. Double elimination.
And for the record, I'm not like some other posters around here. I have followed major-league baseball since Eisenhower was president and given the choice I would take a normal MLB season over a normal NFL, NBA or NHL season.
But that ship has sailed. And crashed on the reefs.
Agree that the current system is unlikely to survive until the end. But I'm not sure I see any viable solution at this point. Just let it play out until its conclusion.
I think that would have been a great start. And you could easily have two (or even three) games per day on a field, since it isn't like you are getting fans in and out. You would need a really good grounds crew to keep the fields in shape but it isn't impossible. Though I guess turning over locker rooms that quickly could be challenging with all of the cleaning that would be needed, but if that is their biggest problem, they would figure it out.
Though this makes me realize why some kind of a bubble wouldn't work for the NFL. Good luck finding some place with all of the fields, and if you tried to have more field utilization so as to have fewer fields (two games on Saturday, two games on Sunday), the fields would very quickly be unplayable. Basketball courts need very little maintenance and are much smaller so that will hopefully be one of the factors that makes the NBA experiment work.
Wll yes, there's no viable solution from where they are now, but it seemed obvious that the MLB strategy wasn't going to work from the beginning. I'm saying they could have made changes prior to starting back up to allow for something similar to the NBA bubble (maybe not exactly like it, but closer than what they have now).Reducing the number of games would have been one obvious place to look.
I'm just saying that "they play too many games too often" isn't a good reason why they couldn't have come up with a better plan going in. I don't think there's any saving it now.
Like others on DBR, I really love MLB and it's my favorite professional sport. Well it's close with the PGA. As far as contact between players, I think baseball has way less contact between players than NFL & NBA. So, it seems that alone would help with Covid-19.
GoDuke and GoCards!
Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013
I am watching more than usual for this time of year. The middle of summer is when I watch the least amount of sports, but seeing how my favorite part of the sports season (conference tournaments —> NBA Finals/golf majors) got cancelled/postponed, I’m paying more attention. My Padres have some sharp new unis and an exciting team, although with all of the turnover during their rebuild, I know like 6 of the players.
Carolina delenda est
There isn't a lot of contact during normal game action, but the MLB doesn't appear to be doing much to limit contact in other contexts (or if they are the players are ignoring it).
I believe football put in a rule where if it was found that you engaged in any risky behavior (basically going to a crowded place, including a religious service at 25% or more capacity) and you got COVID, you would lose your salary. And there are a lot of other very specific protocols in place, though there are still football players getting infected. Sounds like baseball did do anything like this.
The original idea of playing in spring-training sites in Florida and Arizona actually made sense if hot weather had really knocked back COVID-19. But when Florida and Arizona went toxic, that fell apart.
But major-league baseball is designed to be played seven games a week, or a reasonable facsimile therof. The best teams have a quality five-man rotation. Weaker teams do not. Depth matters, or is supposed to. A certain kind of mentality matters. Or is supposed to. It's just not structured any other way. Is anyone expecting NBA teams to play once a week? Or NHL teams. How about 30-minute NFL games? Minimize the risk and all.
We may just have to agree to disagree on this. I don't think there ever any discussion of playing anything fewer than 6/7 games per week, the way it's been done since the beginning of time.
If you think it is literally impossible to have an MLB season without teams playing 7 days per week I guess I don't know what to tell you. Does it change things? Sure, things are going to be different. That's true for all leagues, not just the MLB. If you prefer no season over a season with a more spaced out schedule, well, I guess you're probably about to get your wish.
Edit: FWIW, those examples (30 min football games) don't make any sense, so I'm not sure what your point was. One thing I would recommend for the NFL (that would actually be comparable to changing the MLB schedule), if I were in charge, would be only games on Sunday. Less moving parts, and you always have 7 days between games for testing.
I think there are some substantial differences between the NBA's situation and other sports which allows the NBA bubble concept to potentially be successful when others might not.
The first variable is time - the NBA has already completed most of its season, so it's just the post-season that would be in the bubble. As a result, they are not asking the full league to participate, and also the time in the bubble is limited. Most teams will spend ~1-1.5 months in the bubble, and only the teams that go deep into the playoffs will be there ~2-2.5 months. I think it's different to ask a full league like MLB to spend 4 months in a bubble. With that amount if time do players leave their families at home, or do they move their families with them? Can potential bubble sites accommodate the size of MLB rosters plus families? I think logistics are pretty different for limited completion of playoffs of small roster teams vs full season of large roster teams.
Second (as always) is money. And by that I mean structure and decision making around revenue sources. MLB teams make their money from individual local TV deals; I believe that MLB itself only makes money from the post season. As a result, coordinating 30 individual TV negotiations for different potential season concepts is a challenge, which is one of the reasons why MLB has been so slow to figure out their season. This structure of local TV deals is true for the NBA as well, but given that the regular season is essentially over, all you have is one entity - the NBA league office - working on TV deals with Turner and ESPN so it has to be a lot easier to be nimble and flexible. (Note this is a positive for the NFL as well with central TV deals, but I don't trust the NFL to make good decisions, but that is separate from COVID).
In either case, I am hopeful that NBA and MLB can continue, but also recognize that as soon as 2 teams have a series of positive tests the seasons will fall apart quickly so it is a very delicate situation.