Who's hurt the most in an abbreviated baseball season?
There's just one guarantee as Major League Baseball aims to wedge an 80-plus game schedule and expanded playoffs into a pandemic-driven four-month window: Roughly half the season is gone forever.
Some franchises have pointed to 2020 for several years as the moment their plans would coalesce. Others decided, in a more impetuous fashion, to go all- in on this season. And dozens of players will lose wages, statistics, records and indelible pieces of their legacies they can never get back.
But like everything amid the fall out from COVID-19, some will lose more than others.
Provided health and financial concerns are mitigated, everyone will get as hot at the 2020 World Series. But here are the teams and individuals who will most feel the gut punch that comes with a lost half-season of baseball:
Mookie Betts and the Dodgers
Theirs was to be a temporary marriage, almost certainly: Betts, the best right fielder in the game and 2018 AL MVP, and his new club joining forces to end L. A .' sin creasing ly frustrating title drought before Mookie vaulted into the $300 million players' club via free agency.
Now, they are joined at the hip in trying to make the best of a situation that quickly turned sour.
Yes, it's still possible the Dodgers gave up three young players to the Boston Red Sox and won't see Betts take an at-bat for them due to the novel coronavirus. That alone casts a pall over what would have been something resembling a superteam in more conventional circumstances.
And it's also a bummer for Bet ts' for tunes. Adjusting to a new league is a pain, anyway, and 80 to 100 games allows little runway to overcome a slow start. In moving from east to west, a geographically-based schedule means he'll be f acing al most entirely unfamiliar pitchers and playing in largely foreign ballparks. Betts will still probably fare better in free agency than he would have entertaining extension offers from the Red Sox, but will face a winter in which franchises will cry poor (some of them justifiably) due to big losses in 2020-21.
The incredible shrinking Cubs
Wipe most of a season
from a calendar, and it only makes 2016 seem even further in the past. Joe Maddon is gone and David Ross is the manager, which is weird enough, but now the Cubs' more pressing issues are on an even faster track.
First, pass the hat for ownership, which claims 70% of its revenues come from game-day proce eds, a considerably higher rate than other franchises. Here's hoping the Ricketts family can weather these uncertain times.
Now, consider the fact that at least one of Javier Baez, Kris Bryant, Ant hon yRizzoorJ on Lester have played their last games in front of the Wrigley faithful, assuming no fans are let in until next year.
The Cubs hold 2021 club options onRizzo and Lester. But the huge decisions will come on Baez and Bryant, both free agents after 2021 and headed for certain ninefigure pay days. That makes 2020 far more crucial for the Cubs than most franchises.
A smaller serving of Trout
To be certain, this is not Ted Williams losing three seasons of prime production due to World War II. Or Kirby Puckett's career ending amid 10 consecutive All-Star seasons due to an eye condition.
But Mike Trout is this generation's Williams or Mays or Aaron, and there is a glorious symmetry to his career that will be undeniably disrupted.
Sure, he's spent several stints on the injured list, and hi s other- worldly rate stats ( the man has a .419 career on-base percentage and 1.000 OPS) could conceivably be better in a shorter season.
But consider how the proverbial back of hi s baseball card looks:
Never fewer than 27 home runs a season.
Never fewer than 92 runs scored.
Never a season in which he didn't have at least 172 hits or 94 walks.
Had he equaled his 45 home runs of 2019, Trout would have 330 in his career, through his age -28 season. That's exactly halfway to Mays, who had 250 to that point (and also lost a season to military service).
Should the season come off, Trout will almost certainly eclipse 300 home runs, about a year older than Alex Rodriguez, youngest to 300, was when he pulled it off. That's certainly nothing to downplay.
And like the game itself, a little less Trout in 2020 is better than none at all.