Will The COVID-19 Shortened MLB Season Be The Most Unpredictable Ever? Part 1.
Slowly but surely, the signs are beginning to appear that will signal the return of sports to North America- maybe not for a while yet (and certainly not with fans in attendance), but the elements are falling into place. The consensus seems to be that of the four major North American sports leagues, the MLB will be the first to return to play. The league is currently getting to advanced stages on its return plan (which will need approval from the players union), with the general idea seeming to be that the return will be in early July, ideally around whatever version of the U.S. Independence Day festivities take place under pandemic restrictions.
Should it actually unfold along those lines, the season that fans will see take place will be a strange one to behold indeed. Some of those ways will be obvious- as previously mentioned, fans will, it is virtually certain, not be physically present. Players will likely attempt to observe some form of social distancing on the basepaths and in the field, which could create an awkward looking spectacle at times. Masks may also be worn on the field, as they have been in the KBO (Korean Baseball Organization) and the Taiwanese league, both of which began their seasons this spring with safety precautions in place.
All of these things will play major roles in ensuring that the season is unique to anything that has gone before it in the history of Major League baseball. But amongst all of these potential new elements one key one has yet to be mentioned- the impact that a shortened season will have on the flow of play itself. And the shortened season might create more unpredictable and unusual results for the MLB than any of the other major sports leagues.
Baseball boasts far and away the longest regular season schedule of any of the four North American sports, with its 162 regular season games roughly double the NBA and NHL’s 82 and ten times the NFL’s sixteen. Individual sections of the baseball calendar can feel like years in and of themselves, broken up into subsections each carrying their own aura and mythos appropriate to that of America’s century and a half old “national pastime.”
Obviously, the tradition of the end of March/early April opening day, and subsequent under the radar unfolding of the season’s early days, has been wiped away. When the game does return in July, it will likely, at least at first, be the only major sport on the radar of ESPN and the rest of the sports media universe. This in and of itself will be an unfamiliar position for a sport that has been accused of being old and out of touch, supposedly long supplanted by the NFL and NBA in popularity, especially with younger people.
In the mythos of the MLB calendar, July and August are known as “the dog days.” With the All Star Game in the rearview mirror and the playoff push of September still well ahead, the pace of the season slows to a crawl and individual games cannot help but feel less meaningful even to the most diehard of baseball fans.
That will not be the case in this COVID-19 truncated 2020 season. July and August games will have the feel of an almost playoff atmosphere, bringing the urgency of September into the game from Day 1. Since the season has been shortened nearly by half, there will be little margin for error for teams that are seeking bids to the MLB postseason. Even the powerhouse clubs considered heavy favorites going into the season, such as the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees, will feel a kind of pressure to win, and win immediately from the first days of the regular season.
Another bit of MLB schedule wisdom that will no longer apply is the saying that “the season starts on Memorial Day.” That aphorism essentially means that unexpected teams embarking on hot streaks early in the season should always be taken with a grain of salt, and the converse is true for expected powerhouses that get off to slow starts. The season is so long that time will always tell, and the natural wheat will be separated from the chaff.
A classic example of these two storylines playing out took place during the 2018 MLB regular season, with the Seattle Mariners and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Over the past decade or more, these two franchises could not have been on more diamatrically opposed trajectories. The Mariners have not made the MLB playoffs since 2001, the longest playoff drought in North American sports. Meanwhile, the Dodgers came into 2018 having won the National League West division for five straight years, taking home the pennant the year before and losing the World Series in seven games.
In the early days of the season, these narratives seemed to be flipped on their head. The Dodgers, possibly feeling the “hangover effect” from their World Series loss, swooned to start the season, starting 16–26. Meanwhile, the Mariners stormed out of the gate, at one point leading the Wild Card race by ten games. But the natural order of the baseball universe reasserted itself over the 162 games, with the Dodgers clinching yet another division title on the last game of the regular season, and the Mariners missing the playoffs yet again.
A shortened regular season would have also eliminated the defending World Series champion from 2019. The Washington Nationals got off to a horrible start in 2019, with an early record of 17–31. Manager Dave Martinez was seemingly on the verge of being fired, and rumors were swirling about trading ace pitcher Max Scherzer. But, of course, their fortunes reversed, and the rest was World Series history. With an 80 game season, that 17–31 marker would have been the end of their season.
Predicting what teams might benefit from or suffer thanks to the abbreviated baseball schedule is a nearly impossible exercise. But the 2020 season is likely to produce some unlikely playoff contenders, and seeing these developments play out will add a great deal of drama to the MLB season. In part 2, we will attempt to guess just which teams those might be.
