MLB OWNERS APPROVED A PROPOSAL TO START SEASON IN JULY

The Coronavirus pandemic has forced a lot of different changes in the world throughout the past few months, and one of the biggest ones is the stoppage of all professional sports in the United States. Since sports has always been looked at as a way to help people forget about the stresses of the world, many fans are feeling lost without sports. It all started when the NBA and NHL paused play in the middle of each of their seasons’ to help prevent the spread of this deadly virus. By the time both leagues made this decision, the MLB was preparing for the Opening Day of the 2020 season on March 26th. Since the virus continued to get more serious, the MLB announced that spring training activities would be suspended and players would be sent home.

The date is currently May 11th, and there is still no MLB baseball on the TV instead of old reruns from multiple years ago and the Korean Baseball League is the only baseball being played in the world, which airs their game’s at 4:00am in the United States. There have been many different proposals of ways to still play the 2020 season with the social distancing guidelines in place to ensure the virus isn’t spread in any way. The media has leaked proposals like playing games in Arizona and Florida and even playing Japan, but many MLB players have expressed disapproval since these plans would force them to not see their families for multiple months.

The most recent proposal was approved by the MLB owners this afternoon, which is a proposal to start the season around July fourth weekend in team’s home ballparks without fans, according to Ronald Blum of the Associated Press. Since this delay has been very lengthy, many players will need a shortened spring training to give them time to prepare with their team and this spring training 2.0 would start early to mid June. According to the proposal, each team would play 82 regular season games in opponents in their own division but would also include limited inter league matchups to teams that are similar regions of the company. For example, AL East teams would play against NL East, AL Central vs NL Central and AL West vs NL West. This would make it safer for teams to travel so they won’t put their players at risk by flying around the country and potentially spreading the virus.

According to many Bleacher Report, this proposal will be present to players on Tuesday and the MLB will release a statement before the end of the week regarding their decision. In my opinion, this delay was the best way to stop the spread of COVID- 19 but since the schedule has already been shortened this much, the MLB wants to try to get as many games in as possible. It would be very unrealistic if the MLB attempted to schedule the season going into December since that would drastically effect the scheduling of the 2021 offseason.

This whole process has not only been stressful for the league and the players, but also the fans that look forward each year rooting for their beloved teams each night. No matter how many games are played or where they’re played, I believe that we should all be grateful that there will even be baseball played in 2020.

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