How Optimistic Are You That the 2020 Season Will Be Played?
The exact date of this season’s Opening Day is still unknown, and what with the negotiations between the players and the owners over what to do should there be no baseball played at all this year, it wouldn’t be a surprise if 2020 proved to be a lost season entirely. Given that uncertainty, having our readers guess when the season will begin might be of little utility. And of course, the subtext of guessing when the season will start involves taking a guess at when the COVID-19 pandemic will end, or at least subside sufficiently for us to attempt a return to something resembling normalcy; that’s a tricky, and potentially insensitive, question to contemplate, particularly in service of something as relatively trivial as baseball.
However, it does seem to be of some utility to determine how you, our readers and fellow baseball fans, are feeling about this baseball season. Normally, this time of year is marked by us coming together to share our hopes for individual players and teams. Optimism abounds. But players and teams are at home. So instead, we can share our hope for baseball being played at all. To that end, here is a series of questions meant to gauge your thinking on what this year will look like — or not look like — for baseball.
Thanks for your help. We will report back with your answers.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
Will there be MLB in 2020? – No (32.26%)
How many games will be played? – 0 games (27.22%)
🤦♂️
I noted the same. I think the fact that the first question was binary and the next was not could have contributed to that (although, yes, it does offer the choice of “0” to be selected).
I think that second question would produce better results if the zero choice was removed, and instead it were worded as such: “If there *is* a season, how many games do you think will be played.” (If not “better results” then at least more non-zero results, which has some benefit).
It is quite possible that some of the non-zero answers by “No Season Responders” were of that vein (“If there is a season…”)
Anyhow, I don’t meant to be critical. Not my intent. I’m curious about this myself. believe there is about a 50% chance of play. I constantly waver on this +/- 10%. If there is play, I have envisioned a July 4 return to games, but only if on July 4 we are largely returning to something that resembles normalcy.
WARNER MEDIA is betting mid-august normality.
They might be optimistic.
I had to Google this. I didn’t know what you were referencing.
Warner Media moved its release of “Wonder Woman 1984” to mid-August (from its original June 5).
That’a big nine figure bet.
As a math teacher, this literally kills me inside.
An english teacher might say you “literally” don’t know what that word means.
Sorry, man, I did get your point. ; – )
I have Asperger’s and therefore I’m a literalist to a fault, so when people use the word “literally” like that — wait for it… it literally causes my nerves to fire panic signals and my receptors become overloaded with information.
[Yes, that’s correct, I’m not a lot of fun at parties.]
I kid. Be well. : – )
I always imagine that “literally killing me inside” has something to do with drinking bleach to numb the pain, but realistically that’s a second-order problem and therefore not literally caused by the bad math.
Literally literally means figuratively now.
Exactly! As an English professor, I have to say that words are constantly changing meaning. Just think of the MTV show “Pimp My Ride,” which illustrates the verbing of a previous noun (Pimp) and the nouning of a previous verb (Ride).
Maybe Q2 answers were considering the KBO?
I would expect 0 to be higher than “No” since “No” directly implies 0 games played, but someone who says “Yes” might balk and guessing a number of games played.
Here is what I think is the best-case scenario, which is also what I believe will happen simply because I cannot function without thinking we won’t get any baseball this year. It’s still pretty grim.
1) States like Washington and New York and New Jersey manage to flatten the curve enough so that things start to level in mid-April, but at the same time states that have done less (mostly in the southeast and mountain west) experience what we’re seeing now in New York and New Jersey. In the face of hospitals being completely over-run and tens of thousands of patients being denied care (per state), governor panic a bit too late and cancel everything. The outbreak is mostly under control in the states that are flattening the curve now by May or June; the rest of the states follow behind at some point in June or July.
2) My prediction is that things calm down enough to start Spring Training in June or July, play games at Spring Training complexes near the end of June or beginning of July, and with a triumphant return to games with fans by some point in July. MLB plans to play the regular season through the end of September, with the playoffs starting in October, potentially at neutral site stadiums with domes (or in places where it is still warm enough to play).
3) Epidemiologists will scream themselves hoarse warning that COVID-19 will re-emerge in the fall, but no one listens; in mid-September, outbreaks of COVID-19 reappear, leading to games being played without fans for a week before everything is canceled again. There are no playoffs. Baseball put on hiatus until 2021.
I don’t know exactly how many games that comes out to, but I think we’ve got approximately two months of games, with somewhere between 1-3 weeks thrown in the better case scenario. No matter what happens, I think that 3 weeks of games will be played without fans.
I agree some games without fans. Hard to imagine a situation where this doesn’t happen, honestly, as risk mitigation.
Also think at some point some games are cancelled after the season starts, due to a team battling infection, or moved due to a local outbreak.
Finally, I would not be surprised if the playoffs are cancelled. However, I don’t know that no one will listen. The longer and worse it is now, the more likely people listen in the fall. The better preventive measures work now, the more likely people treat it lightly in the fall.
So generally, I think this is a good take, even if I don’t like it.
I’m a bit more optistic because the virus prefers high density populations.
(Urban sprawl will limit it.)
(Fingers crossed.)
But baseball won’t be played without NY or ChiTown and those are going to be making news long after the rest of the country is close to normal.
(MSN has a live virus tracking table that breaks it down by county. Check it out. It’s eye-opening. Like, Westchester has more victims than all of California and Washington state combined. And NYC is off the charts. Literally.)
They’ll be lucky if they can play by august.
Sept isn’t out of question.
Yes, NYC is in a lot of trouble right now. Apparently the morgues are running out of space. I wonder if they’re going to have to start using ice rinks as body storage facilities like in Spain or something crazy.
I’m simultaneously less optimistic that it’s going to stick to high-density places and more optimistic that flattening the curve will yield results. It’s looks like Italy’s cases have already peaked, but there’s also likely considerably less social distancing that people are doing in less dense areas right now, and that’s likely to continue regardless (especially if some governors wait until it’s too late to start shutting things down).
Refrigerated rail cars.
I doubt the mayor will think of that but the governor might.
NYC has all the resources of the entire east coast to work with. I doubt they’ll run out of ICU units in the region.
Nobody is getting tested. Nobody knows how many people have it. Anywhere.
This is the problem. One moment’s results provide the platform for the next moment’s. Hence, exponential growth. Because testing is insufficient, we lack the information needed to identify the prevalence of the plague. It is reasonable to consider the reported counts as the floor for the actual case count.
Would you mind linking to that MSN live virus tracking table? I’m having trouble finding it.
Point #3 is the reason why it could get canceled altogether — because of the threat of the virus to re-emerge in the fall. Even if our efforts to shelter-in-place and social distancing – combined with the possibility that the increased UV of the summer months helps kill the virus – manage to drop cases down to relatively few…it could come back in Sept or Oct as the short season is ending or the playoffs are beginning.
But I hope we can hear the words “Play Ball!” this summer.
…it may depend somewhat on how it goes in the KBO and Nippon leagues as they start up. We will be learning lessons from them before we are even ready for spring training #2
I’m of the mind that baseball is going to happen, even if it’s just played at spring training complexes with no audience. The only way I think that doesn’t happen is if Arizona and Florida ban gatherings of more than 100 people or so through the summer, which is possible given how weak the response of those governors has been so far.
I think if baseball is possible, MLB wants baseball to happen, and will make it happen for as long as they can before they have to shut down again.
I think there comes a point in time where having some shell of a season is actually worse than having no season at all. Not from a fan’s perspective, of course, but from the owners’ and players’. We’re not there yet clearly, but if it’s June and still looking iffy, I suspect they will just cancel the whole thing and focus on 2021.
The real scary problem is that there is no guarantee we don’t have a similar problem next year. We don’t have much evidence yet if having recovered from the illness gives someone long-term/permanent immunity. And once restrictions loosen, it could easily spread again.
At some point, the virus will be a less severe problem, though potentially always with us to some extent, like regular colds and flu. But I’m not sure that date is 2021.
It’ll come down to negotiations over service time, the details of insurance contracts as they relate to both coronavirus and/or an entire missed season, tax write offs, how willing players and owners are to risk players’ health (death isn’t the only risk, lung damage is a risk too), and the unlikely but possible rapid development of a cure or vaccine.
Just so we’re all on the same page about developments of vaccines and antivirals:
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/24/when-might-experimental-drugs-to-treat-covid-19-be-ready-a-forecast/
That’s a good one.
Bookmarked it.
One thing to bear in mnd about vaccines and other new treatmenrs: widespread use will depend on the approval rules used: FDA or the more lenient Euro rules. Tge FDA is notoriously conservative (normally very, very good) on approving new drugs and processes but we’ve already seen those rules get in tbe way of approving newer, cheaper tests. In the meantime, the french got their cocktail dosage worked out with just a couple dozen tests. Somebody needs to remind tbe FDA that a bit of risk is better than a lot of danger.
Some of the listed approaches look promisibg, especially the serology ones. It not as if there’s a shortage of survivors. The thing is infectious as heck but it’s not ebola-deadly.
Again, I’m optimistic.
We’ll work out something.
Yep, either hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine work well, or, we’re looking at almost no hope from the drug sector for helping make 2020 MLB baseball happen.
Good for humanity and baseball.
Bad for certain politicians.
Lets hope for baseball.
Virtually every existing drug right now is being tested, including antimalarials and antivirals. So it’s possible there’s something else out there that will work if those two fail.
But yes, the odds of any one of them panning out is…low.
I am surprised at how many pessimists there are among us. I may not be as optimistic as Donald Trump, but I don’t see any way this goes 12-18 months either. If we are dealing with this 18 months out then all of this cancelling/social distancing , IMO, would have been in vain.
Reported Over/under is about three months.
With the season six months long, that is half a season. Add in a couple weeks’ training and you’re in the july-august time period. And that is the optimist take.
One thing people forget is that the job of the Prez, regardless of who sits in the office, is to tamp down fears and prevent panic so cautious optimism is required. The only thing to fear is fear itself. Unless you’re looking to profit from panic and disaster. And sadly there are opportunistic panic-mongers and profiteers out there. And not just for money.
It’ll go on for 12-18 months unless we start getting testing to the scale of the crisis. Which is possible, if someone in Washington starts caring that tons of people are going to die.
And it won’t really have been in vain. Without this, hundreds of thousands of extra people die and the economy crashes to a halt anyway.
” then all of this cancelling/social distancing , IMO, would have been in vain” I think you misunderstand the point of “all this”. it is not to keep people from getting sick. Only a cure can do that. It’s to try and keep the number of sick people down at one time, so our hospitals have a shot at treating them all. It is very likely most of us will get it eventually unless we (as in the world) find a cure way faster than the historical norm. Multiple standard deviations faster than normal. It’s very possible because everyone in the world is working on it. But, I wouldn’t bet my house its done before fall!
No, I understand . I am a physician and I understand. I still stand by my original comment. 18 months is entirely too long of a prediction. Granted nobody really knows. If the virus is a threat 18 months from now we are doing many many things wrong right now.
(1) We are doing many things wrong now and have for months, and years if we count Trump’s dismantling of the team dedicated to prepare for a pandemic. We waited far too long to impose social distancing and measures to enforce it; our response has been chaotic because of the fragmented delivery of health care, a condition made worse by the erratic decisions and statements from Trump. We failed to stockpile personal protective equipment before the pandemic, which is especially problematic because the biggest producer of N95 masks in Wuhan and the biggest make of swabs used for testing in in Lombardi, Italy, where production and distribution has been slowed be massive outbreaks there. We failed to quickly secure and build ventilators and quickly create new capacity to provide critical care, so hospitals are already running out in NY and Michigan even though the deluge has just begun. And then we had a president who is only concerned about re-election toy with opening up business for Easter.
(2) You may be a physician but you are not an expert in infectious disease, pandemic or epidemiology. You would not practice beyond your scope of expertise and you should only opine about that scope if you have taken the time to review modelling and projections by experts who are uniform in predicting it will take 12 to 18 month to create, test and manufacture sufficient vaccine to make it available to high-risk people only. There is no infrastructure to manufacture a vaccine for a coronavirus because there has never been a vaccine for a coronavirus: Both SARS and MERS were contained before a vaccine was create because those infections were both less contagious, more lethal and with quicker onset of critical symptoms, qualities that were awful if you were infected but also qualities that made them much easier to contain.
I will assume a late June start, with around 112 games played, with double headers fitting in, no all-star game, and playoffs ending mid to late November with fewer off-days in the playoffs, and playoff games in neutral sites.
That would be incredible! But it sounds like MLB wants to keep the all-star game. We’ll see.
Unlikely the players (esp good pitchers) would agree to this kind of schedule.
My brother is a chair of medicine at Harvard medical school and a practicing Surgeon and he says we have only just begun to feel the effects of this virus, so I’m not optimistic we will see baseball anytime this summer. About 2/3 of all Americans have to get sick before enough survivors are immune to stop the spread, or we need to get super lucky and stumble upon a cure quickly. But I really hope we do see baseball! I miss it in my life!
I upvoted you even though it made me sad to do so, both for baseball and the deaths that are happening and will continue to happen.
thank you!