What the 2020 Season Will Look Like: Crowdsource Results Round 2
Not long after Opening Day was originally postponed, I asked our readers for their thoughts on how and whether the 2020 season would play out. I wanted to get a sense of everyone’s expectations. Those results were published on the last day of March. At the time, some in the comments wondered how the results might change in the weeks to follow, given the speed with which new information on the pandemic was becoming available. To see if perspectives had changed, I asked the same set of questions again last week. In the first round, we generally ended up with 1,000 to 1,500 responses per question. This time around, we received about 500 more responses per question. Here are those results.
First, I asked whether there would be a 2020 season:
Overall, there was still a considerable amount of optimism, but the number of people who believed we will get a season dropped about three percentage points from late-March.
In looking at the number of games played, 76-100 remained the most popular response:
This is what the responses look like side-by-side:
As for when the season will begin, July was still the most popular response:
Both June and July dropped slightly, with “Never” gaining ground, but more than 2/3 of readers thought the season would begin in one of the first two summer months.
The big change versus the first round of polling came when readers were asked about regular season games at spring training sites. Two weeks ago, 59% of the responses said that no regular season games would be played at spring training sites, with just 10% saying that only Arizona would be used for regular season games. After details regarding an Arizona plan emerged, that response shot to the top of the list:
Florida and Arizona both actually dropped 10 percentage points from the previous poll, though that view might have changed given the reports of a potential Arizona-Florida plan to start the regular season. In a somewhat related change, 35% of people believed that no regular season games would be played without fans in the first iteration of this poll. That response still take the top spot, but it has dropped considerably:
Last time, only 17% of the responses indicated that there would be at least 50 regular season games played without a crowd, but now 42% of people expected a great number of fanless games. A majority expects 26 or more games without crowds.
As for the playoffs, there was a decrease in the number of people expecting the standard playoff format, which received roughly half the responses last time:
More rounds/teams saw the biggest spike, moving up from around 20% of responses last time. In terms of when the playoffs would actually end, the latter half of November held strong in the top spot and gained a few percentage points, but December and no season also saw some gains that took away from early November:
For the most part, there’s still a good deal of optimism from readers. People generally expect a season to start in July with the teams playing half a season, though there will be many games played without fans. That was the biggest shift from the previous pole, with many changing their expectations regarding fanless games, and in particular, fanless games at spring training sites.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
If they’re using the Designated Hitter than I’m not going to watch. DH baseball is like watching a hamster run on the wheel. I don’t watch AL baseball unless it’s the postseason because of the higher intensity of play. The DH must go. Shohei Ohtani should be the ambassador for getting rid of the DH.
Simmer down.
Watching pitchers up at the plate is beyond embarrassing— and its past time to move away from that the whole strategy thing simply doesn’t hold water to me. I mean Noah Syndergaard struck out like 70% of the time and pitchers get worse and worse at the plate and really might as well stop giving away outs.
I mean, at that right, might as well do the same for short stops. And what about light hitting catchers? Why do we need to watch them flail around at the plate?
A team can use the DH to hit for any position, including shortstop and catcher if they wish.
Actually, while that rule would make sense, as it stands now, only the pitcher can be DHed for.
Federation Rules (high school) allow you to use a DH to hit in place of any position. I think the high school rule causes people to think, sometimes, that it’s part of MLB’s Official Baseball Rules.
Besides for Jeff Mathis none of those guys “ hit” like pitchers
Because catchers, on a whole, have bottomed out at 84 wRC+ over the last 3 years; shortstops at 88 (and they were up to 98 in 2019). Meanwhile, pitchers turned in their best season last year at -18 wRC+. Adding the DH to both leagues solved the PERCEIVED issue of “too little offense”, it could extend more careers, or it could give guys like, oh I don’t know…. Mike Ford a better chance of finding a home – and I’m guessing 10 out of 10 of us would rather watch Mike Ford hit over Alex Wood.
Tbh I don’t have a strong preference, I like baseball either way. I enjoy how bad pitchers are at hitting in a perverse sort of way.
OK boomer
The more I read about these plans, I’m less confident in there being any season at all, and certainly way less confident in it showing up in the next couple of months. Someone said it the other day: Until I hear an actual answer to “what happens if a player tests positive” I don’t see how this is going to work.
I don’t know if you’re referring to one of my comments, but I’ve been saying for a while that this is the big question. Testing, social distancing, etc. can definitely bring the infection rate down to a level that any public health official would be thrilled with in most settings. But that level isn’t zero. It’s possible that MLB could get through the season with no cases that required shutting a team down, but it would be foolish to bet on it.
I also want to know where the MLBPA will stand on this. I assume the owners can’t unilaterally decide on a season format and demand that the players show up and submit to quarantine, so the union will need to be on board. Which isn’t really a problem, I’m sure the players want to play baseball. But will the union ratify something that requires all players to participate or be in violation of their contracts, or will they want individual players to be able to opt out? I’ve seen a lot of speculation about players not wanting to leave their families or put themselves at risk, so I could see some players wanting the union to push for the choice. I don’t know how it will shake out, but MLB is only one side of the equation. Speaking of, don’t the umpires have a union too?
I don’t remember who made it, but maybe? The issue is:
-Are you going to try to put everyone involved in the season in a bubble? or
-Are you willing to take the embarrassment of canceling tons of scheduled games? And if so, what kind of health capacity is the league going to invest in?
Because when one person tests positive, they need to go in quarantine. If one person on a team tests positive, you need to test everyone who came in contact with them (which would be everyone on the current and previous teams) and do a deep clean. If a critical mass of players test positive, you cancel games.
But unless a state is willing to publicly devote scarce testing resources to MLB, which seems not in the public interest, MLB would probably have to build their own test-and-trace operation. Right now, we don’t even have enough tests to test everyone who comes in contact with a COVID-19 positive person–they just tell everyone to go in isolation. And if they do that, they’ll have to cancel games every single time a player tests positive.
Or, you can try to put everyone in a bubble, which would require quarantining everyone who comes into contact with MLB players in a nice little bubble.
Is MLB able and willing to do one of those things? I’m not sure.
I was working on my comment above when you posted this. The same question is before the players and everybody else in every team’s extended operation . How many of them getting COVID-19 would it take for them to say “no mas”?
I think the real answer is “1 person,” even if that’s kind of unrealistic for people to expect that no one will be infected,. I don’t want to say that’s an inappropriate response, it’s not my health on the line, but it seems naive to think no one will get sick. Thankfully, other leagues in other places will get going before baseball, and baseball can learn from others’ response.
Maybe we can finally get the Robot Umps Now!
Your response relates closely to my question. What will be the response from the public if COVID-19 never completely goes away but lingers around at a very low rate? 1 in 10,000 still adds up to 33,000 cases nationwide. I would take those odds if I could be promised that I would eventually recover, but it doesn’t always happen. I have little confidence in finding a therapy that will cure the patients after infection occurs. That just doesn’t happen with viruses as opposed to bacterial infections.
You have to be able to test everyone and get results quickly. This is already possible. It’s really more about allocation of resources. It will take effort. That effort could be used elsewhere. If the healthcare system is strained, it would look awful (look at how WWE is being viewed now). The pandemic needs to be under control. That’s it. Unless that happens, even if the logistics work, the optics won’t.
Yeah *any* plan for starting play presupposes that in a couple months there’s an abundance of tests, medical personnel, face masks, etc. due to a lower infection rate and increased production, so that MLB wouldn’t be diverting critical resources. And it’s pretty reasonable to think that could happen by June or July. Nobody has seriously suggested that MLB resume play until we’re on the downside of the peak, I don’t think.
The problem is that even ubiquitous testing only tells you who’s already sick (or asymptomatic but contagious, which is the same for our purposes). It doesn’t stop them from being infected in the first place, and it doesn’t tell you who they infected between when they first became contagious and when you tested them. Current best practice is that anybody who was in close contact with an infected person self-isolates for 14 days in case they caught the virus. In the context of a baseball player testing positive, that probably means you have to isolate the whole team. Maybe their last opponent as well. For obvious reasons, many people are assuming that a season can’t really be played with that threat looming.
Maybe MLB sees some way to distance players from each other to the point that they won’t have to isolate a whole team, just one or two players. I don’t see how, but I’m sure they’re thinking about it.
Honestly, I’m not sure I even want baseball to resume until it can just be played normally. Picturing a game played in empty stadiums, with players wearing face masks, afraid to celebrate together after a home run… that sounds almost as depressing as no baseball at all.
I’m pretty certain baseball will use scarce resources. Look how quickly the Jazz got tests.
That really is a different situation, but considering all the negative press associated with that situation, I think it really is another point in favor of my argument.
Revisiting my comment about baseless American optimism has yielded results beyond my wildest expectations. Sports are truly where developmentally arrested males park their most irrational emotions.
Baseball is way more pessimistic than Soccer pretty much anywhere. Most leagues in Europe are trying to get going in May.
Oh right take your meds
Your decision to embrace being a childish piece of shit amuses me.
I’m assuming you can’t afford real therapy, so the local pill farm psychiatrist is probably the only place you will get any real help for your issues. None of which you will find here.
I’m sure you assume lots of really dumb things, my dude.
I really wouldn’t say wanting to see sports again reflects any level of arrested emotional development. Irrationality, definitely, but irrationality isn’t necessarily bad. It’s natural for people to want to see the thing they like again, especially when they’re looking for distractions and waiting for life to get back to “normal.” Yes, the optimism is baseless, and yeah, some of the people calling for sports to come back are in the “re-open the economy to save the market” crowd. But don’t rip on sports fans for wanting to watch sports (especially on a website exclusively devoted to baseball analysis!), and definitely don’t treat irrationality as something that’s exclusive to sports fans.
For reference, here is an interview with a former FDA head about the hurdles needed to move into “phase two”–the testing and tracing.
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/14/21219021/scott-gottlieb-coronavirus-covid-19-social-distancing-economy-recession
Which states are going to be ready for this? Massachusetts. Is that it? It sure sounds like that’s it. I guess you could have them play at all those college fields and just have everyone live in Boston? Plus the Lowell Spinners. Does that sound feasible? It would make it a lot easier if other states had built up this capacity, or if we had an effective antiviral, but who knows where/when that will be.
Commissioner Manfred made some statements today in an interview, during which he said that the “plans” that have been discussed publicly are no more than “ideas,” actually. He also said that MLB considers the public health as a greater priority than resuming play.
Then later this afternoon — I am not sure it came from the same interview of Manfred — news broke that MLB players and employees are participating in a “massive study that will test up to 10,000 people for coronavirus antibodies and should offer researchers a better sense of how widespread the disease is in major metropolitan areas across the United States, though doctors caution that the data gathered is not expected to hasten the game’s return.”
This was posted on ESPN (5:25 PM EDT):
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29036123/mlb-players-team-employees-participating-coronavirus-study
I think this gives you a good picture of who has had it, which is a necessary first step. The next step is getting players and staff to opt into aggressive contact tracing prior to and during the season (whatever the season looks like). This probably means cell phone tracking, which is trivial to collect after the fact but is actually nontrivial to collect and analyze “on-line.” Stanford football of all people was messing around with this a couple of years ago where they were trying to seat people together dynamically at games, like you come to a game with a group of friends, and your seat number doesn’t get generated until you show up at the game. Was pretty easy to do at the point of scanning, was a little harder to do on demand using historical data.
The technical challenges are pretty significant, just in terms of resource demands
@Duke, I was looking for info on that Stanford football seating experiment, just for curiosity’s sake, but I could not find anything. (OK, I didn’t look too hard.)
If you are able, can you send a link, please? Thank you. : – )
It was from a fairly deep discussion I had with an ops professor there over lunch at a small conference I was at. I dunno if there’s a paper (it seemed like a lot of work for something that wasn’t particularly academically interesting). This was 2016-2017 I want to say. I can do some digging. I wasn’t working in the area at the time, so I didn’t really ask him about whether they were using another data set besides their ticketing app, but now that I have a location set, I’m curious.
Ask Fauci. He’s a diehard Nationals fan.