CLUB SKED NO HOLIDAY
MLB’s Chris Marinak is the man responsible for the 2020 schedule; it has not been an easy mission
You think you were the only one trying to keep your sanity awaiting majorleague baseball’s return? Meet Chris Marinak, MLB’s executive vice president for strategy, technology and innovation.
He happens to be responsible for scheduling the 2020 season, with the schedule being officially announced in the next 10 to 14 days.
“Oh, my God, it’s been a long road,’’ Marinak told USA Today. “The struggle, the challenge was just not knowing. We all wanted to play as soon as possible, but the virus was going to dictate that. We had to wait but wanted to be ready to go when we got the word.
“Now, here we are, a pretty good schedule given how much time is left.’’
Never before has a complete MLB schedule been formulated this close to Opening Day, with less than a month to go.
Then again, there has never been a season like this, operating at the will of the coronavirus pandemic.
Yet MLB, with an exhaustive 100-pluspage health and safety operations manual, will attempt to become the first major sport to return on July 23 with two nationally televised games, and the rest of the teams scheduled to start July 24.
It will be the shortest season since 1878, playing only 60 of the normal 162 games (37%), with each team playing 40 games in its division and 20 interleague games against the corresponding geographical division.
MLB toyed with the idea of realignment but wanted to keep the traditional divisions, while still playing interleague games and keeping the natural interleague rivalries.
So we will still have the Cubs and White Sox playing each other six times. The same with the Yankees and Mets, Dodgers and Angels, Giants and Athletics, and Indians and Reds.
Marinak and Chuck Torres, MLB senior director of broadcast operations and administration, spent perhaps 400 hours working on the thousands of permutations of the schedule, keeping in constant contact with every team.
It was exasperating never knowing when the season would start or how many games would be played.
“You just didn’t know the start date, the end date,’’ Marinak said, “and we were coming up with anything plausible based on the nightly news.’’
The historic schedule, in some ways, was easier to formulate with no fans in the stands — at least at the outset. There was no need to worry about teams complaining about the lack of weekend home games or having too many home games when school was in session.
Playing games within your geographical region, eliminating cross-country flights, also lessened the burden of implementing days off or mandated day games.
And with no concerts or events staged at any ballpark during this pandemic, there were no scheduling conflicts. The only event MLB needed to work around was the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee from Aug. 17-20, making sure the Brewers were out of town for a week with the lack of hotel rooms.
Every team will be at their home ballpark except possibly the Blue Jays, who need approval from the Canadian government to ease travel restrictions. If the Blue Jays don’t receive approval, they are expected to play their home games in St. Petersburg, Florida, sharing the Rays’ facility.
This will be a schedule built for prime-time TV, with the highest percentage of games during local markets’ prime time in baseball history considering the regional schedule and precious few day games. Without travel to the West Coast, no team in the American League
East or National League East will have to play a 9 p.m. (Central) game.
Marinak and Torres tried to eliminate as much travel as possible in this schedule. Teams that normally stop in Chicago, New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles for a three-game series will be staying for an entire week. There still will be two-game series, but most will last three and four games.
“We did a lot of things in the schedule trying to minimize the potential health risks,” Marinak said. “Hopefully, this will keep guys fresher.’’
The schedule sure came a long way from the early days of the pandemic shutdown, when MLB thought it could actually return by April 10.
Next on the agenda was the potential Arizona Bubble Plan with all 30 teams playing in Arizona. The players nixed that idea before it ever got off the ground.
“That would have been a completely different structure,’’ Marinak said, “but the players didn’t want to do it. It was sort of a military-style situation. It would have been too tough to enforce the rules. Playing doubleheaders in Arizona in 120-degree heat, is this really something we wanted to do? Then we looked at playing in Arizona and Florida. Then Arizona, Florida and Texas.
“Nothing went far enough down the road, but we had nothing else to do. We were just sitting around for a month during the worst of it in late March and April with the entire world shut down. So we looked at different models and simulated as much as we could.’’
So now MLB can only wait, and pray, that COVID-19 will cooperate, enabling the 60game season to take place in its entirety, with a World Series to remember. There might be fans at ballparks at some point in the season, but never close to capacity.