Fair or foul, it’s time to play ball
With a 60-game regular season starting next month, will fans find their way back to America’s pastime?
After an extended labor-management standoff that reflects 2020 America — divided, suspicious and leery of compromise — Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association came to a final agreement Tuesday on plans to begin the 2020 season next month.
Players will report to their teams July 1 for the COVID-19-era equivalent of spring training, with the Astros working out at Minute Maid Park, and plans call for teams to begin a 60-game schedule on either July 23 or 24.
“Major League Baseball is thrilled to announce that the 2020 season is on the horizon,” commissioner Rob Manfred said. “We have provided the
Players Association with a schedule to play 60 games and are excited to provide our great fans with baseball again soon.”
Those fans likely will be watching from home as games unfold in empty stadiums or in front of limited audiences. That presumes, of course, that they haven’t been soured by weeks of haggling between billionaire owners and millionaire players about whether games could be played safely in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic — and, of course, how much players would be paid.
Appropriately, in this year when nothing is as it was, there will be a few changes in the COVID-ball era.
For the first time, the designated hitter will be expanded to
the National League, but only for 2020. For extra-inning games, plans call for each half-inning to begin with a runner on second base, a rule used in softball since the early 2000s, in an effort to limit game lengths over the course of a compacted schedule. The standard American League and National League alignments will remain in place, and regular-season interleague games will match the corresponding East, West and Central divisions for each league.
For the Astros, that means more late night games against the San Diego Padres, Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants, plus the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies, in the National League West.
The regular season will end Sept. 27, and the playoff structure will remain the same — three division winners and two wild cards advancing in each league.
Teams will operate under the guidance of a 100-page list of health and safety guidelines that were finalized Tuesday evening.
Counting on the stars
Tuesday’s agreement brought to an end to a back-and-forth series of negotiations that tested baseball’s fan base and resulted in MLB’s being the last, rather than first, major league to have a plan to return.
Longtime students of the game, though, believe fans still will watch games on television while waiting for the day they can return, cautiously, to Minute Maid and other big league ballparks.
“Fans will forget about the dustup and will get involved in baseball season,” said Andrew Zimbalist, the Smith College economist who advised on the marathon Ken Burns documentary, “Baseball.”
“It all depends on whether the stars all come back and have decent years, that not too many players get sick or the country doesn’t experience another spike. If all that happens, and if the owners and players know enough not to continue to be shrill with each other in public, fans will forgive and forget.”
For both owners and players, 60 games are better than none but fall considerably short of the standard 162-game regular season. And both sides will bear the financial impact.
Forbes estimates that MLB took in $10.7 billion in 2019, and about half of that was tied to local in-stadium income streams — tickets, parking, suite sales, advertising and concessions. Television revenue also could be affected by the shorter season, which will see players’ salaries reduced from $4 billion to $1.48 billion.
“It will be painful, and I’m dubious about how much better it will get any time soon,” Zimbalist said. “On one hand you have lingering concerns about public health and when you’ll be able to fill stadiums again to capacity. And there’s no way the economic engine next
April will be anywhere near where it was in January of this year.
“There are issues that cannot be resolved in the short term. It is a problem at least for the next two years, and it will be continue to be felt for years after that.”
A history of bouncing back
If nothing else, though, baseball has proved its resilience through the years across scandals, labor disruptions and player departures during World War II and the Korean War. Now, fans and players alike will see how the game weathers a pandemic and the labor disputes it has sparked and will continue to provoke.
“The writer Robert Creamer once said that baseball must be a fabulous game, because it survives all the terrible things it does to it itself,” said public relations executive Richard Levick.
“We are in a time of unknown unknowns. If there ever were a season to miss the season, this would have been it.”
Levick has concerns about baseball’s future in light of the labormanagement rows that will continue into 2021, the final year of the collective bargaining agreement.
“It is at increasing risk of being less and less of America’s game,” he said. “The only brand that the league has right now in its absence is the distrust between labor and management. How ironic that it has become America’s game in that way.”
Pitcher Trevor Bauer of the Reds reflected that observation in a Monday night social media post.
“It’s absolute death for this industry to keep acting as it has been. Both sides,” Bauer wrote. “We’re driving the bus straight off a cliff. How is this good for anyone involved? Covid 19 already presented a lose lose lose situation and we’ve somehow found a way to make it worse. Incredible.”
Veteran broadcast executive Neal Pilson, however, is more sanguine.
“I don’t think baseball has damaged itself that badly,” Pilson said. “Once the game resumes, I don’t believe that the average fan is going to change his viewing or attendance habits because players and owners couldn’t agree on how many games would constitute a regular season.
“Some people have a religious attachment to baseball. The average fan just wants them to play.”
Still a chance of boos
If nothing else, the delayed opening has provided a respite for the Astros and their fans from the onslaught of hatred and derision that was expected to follow the team in the wake of the sign-stealing scandal that led to sanctions against the ballclub and the dismissal earlier this year of general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch.
Since games likely either will be played with no fans or limited fans for the abbreviated season, Astrosbaiting, at least in person, will be reduced to a dull roar for the time being.
But it won’t go away, predicted Tony Adams, the Astros uberfan who devoted hours and hours of the offseason in documenting how frequently the Astros availed themselves of an electronic sign-stealing system in 2017, the year they won the franchise’s only World Series.
“I don’t think fans are going to let up on the Astros,” Adams said. “When they get a chance, they’ll boo them, and they’ll be booing them for quite a while.”
Adams also expects fans to get over the delayed beginning to the season while players and owners haggled over return-to-play details. He is concerned, however, about whether baseball can be played safely as the number of COVID-19 cases continues to spike in Texas and other MLB outposts.
“I’m afraid it will be tough to get the season in as the virus spreads,” Adams said. “It’s already a compromised season. Players could test positive and have to go into quarantine, and that would affect competitive balance. If you go into a playoff and, say, (pitcher) Justin Verlander tests for COVID-19, that could make a pretty significant difference.
“I just hope they can get the season done. I think fans will watch with the same enthusiasm, but if players test positive and have to miss time, it’s going to feel even more off than it already is.”