Season looking like a real 7-inning stretch

Come on, the summertime tradition of following baseball around here hasn’t really changed all that much.

It’s just that instead of wondering whether the Phillies will win that night’s game, fans get to wonder whether or not the Phillies and their opponents will get to play any night’s game.

This just in from the local chapter of the embattled MLB publicity machine: “Out of an abundance of caution, the Phillies’ three-game weekend series of games with the Blue Jays ... has been postponed.”

Get used to it.

Baseball, as the Miami Marlins and Phillies and several of their previously scheduled opponents so sadly realize, is threatening to become a series of stops and starts, negative and positive flows, with everyone heading down the same, stupid rabbit hole.

Endless waves of virus tests, and of course at the expense of all available testing for the public at large (but we don’t like to talk about that), along with the resultant schedule chaos has sent teams spinning.

Player absences will immediately alert the media, but will never be explained by MLB management teams who keep saying they’ve never had to deal with this before. Apparently, they’re not very good at thinking on their feet.

Feelings of confusion and paranoia among players who haven’t opted out, yet might be wondering why they haven’t after being exposed by teammates and opponents, are growing and could become rampant. Silence, however, will be the golden management rule as deemed by Commissioner Rob Manfred, who every day seems to close his office door behind him a tad quicker than the day before.

Do you think he really believes the ongoing saga of two teams essentially on indefinite stoppage time is just a July anomaly?

That it won’t happen again and that all the teams can’t make up games lost?

Of course he doesn’t believe that. That’s why there is discussion of the ridiculous contingency plan of not forcing teams to play “entire” 60-game seasons and instead hope their winning percentage is high enough at season’s end to qualify for whatever quickly choreographed playoff system will be developed.

Oh, and then last night, word leaked of a greater crime: In an effort to avoid so many teams falling so far short of 60 games, MLB and its players association reached a deal to get a 2020-only rule addendum that will allow seven-inning games for doubleheaders. Seven. Inning. Games. Appalling. All you available American Legion players who haven’t quite lost your dream of making it to the bigs, don’t give up hope. You’re almost there already.

Where the public is with all this, however, doesn’t matter one little bit. You aren’t there to watch (and boo), and so quite literally have no say in the process. Just as you have no say with the ongoing hockey and basketball bubble worlds in Canada and Florida, the ever-expanding NFL reserve/COVID-19 lists of what Roger Goodell confidently and comically claims will be almost a normal NFL season.

But worst of all is Big Baseball.

The schedule-slayed bigleague teams carry on, all in the name of a needy urgency to qualify for all that network television money still out there in our COVID-stricken, culturerobbed world. What other reason to play?

It’s no accident that smaller college sports leagues have thrown up their hands and largely given up on fall sports. It’s because there’s no money to be made there. Not so for the big boys of Division I, or as it’s known now, FBSC ... whatever those letters are that identify the respective collegiate football money classes.

No one was going to care whether North Dakota State was going to be given the chance to defend its FCS national title. But Clemson? Play on, collect the cash.

It’s the same principle everywhere, of course, even while Gary Bettman deadpans to the media that running his bubble hockey tournament was going to cost tens of millions of dollars, all for good of the fans and the game.

He didn’t say how much money there was to be made off it via network contracts and endorsement deals.

So be it. After all, the games are played in the cause of revenue, and coronavirus has taken revenue of one sort or another from each and every one of us. It’s also rapidly robbed Manfred’s league of any shred of dignity, but hey, dignity and pride come cheap.

So do overmatched baseball commissioners.

The Phillies won’t be able to play again until Tuesday at the earliest. And unless that scheduled game in Miami isn’t rescheduled somewhere far, far away, they won’t play then, either.

That Phillies-Marlins series was likely going to be rescheduled for Philadelphia, just as the Toronto series this weekend was rescheduled for Philly.

But then it was discovered Thursday that those clubhouses at Citizens Bank Park aren’t so easily disinfected after all.

If that series in Miami is postponed altogether just like the last three Phillies series (Yankees at home, Yankees on the road, Toronto) were, the club would next be scheduled to play at CBP against the Braves ... starting on August 7. That would be the three-week anniversary of the so-called season opener, and the Phillies would have played all of three games up to that point.

This isn’t baseball, it’s a MLS schedule.

Should it get better from here? Yes. Is what happened to the Marlins and Phillies an anomaly? Nah.

But even if no additional outbreaks are experienced, the Phillies and the Marlins are probably going to have to play a lot of seveninning DH games in order to come close to catching up with everyone else over the course of the next exhausting two months. Their players will be overstressed, their pitching staffs will break down, their fans ... well, cardboard cutouts can only withstand so many hot doubleheaders, no matter how few innings it takes to play them in this cruelly unforgettable season.

But at least the cardboard fans can always say they tested negative in the worst year baseball has ever experienced.

Rob Parent Columnist