Everybody (Baseball’s Back)

If everybody is somewhere between “extremely optimistic” and “in willful denial,” at least:

Major League Baseball plans to unilaterally issue a 60-game schedule for its shortest season since 1878 after the players’ association rejected a negotiated deal of the same length, putting the sport on track for a combative return to the field amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Commissioner Rob Manfred and union head Tony Clark met last week and outlined plans that included expanding the playoffs from 10 teams to 16, widening use of the designated hitter to National League games and an experiment to start extra innings with a runner on second base. But the latest version of the deal proposed by MLB was rejected by the Major League Baseball Players Association’s executive board in a 33-5 vote on Monday.

Those innovations now disappear.

I never thought I would have any nostalgia for Bud Selig but at least “doesn’t palpably despise the sport he’s in charge of” was a bar he managed to clear that Rob Manfred doesn’t.

This aside, I still have yet to hear a remotely convincing response to this problem:

All the while, the coronavirus upended plans of many clubs to resume training at their Florida facilities due to a rise in virus cases in the state. Twenty-nine teams intend to work out in their regular-season ballparks, with Toronto awaiting additional talks with the Canadian federal and Ontario provincial governments.

There are multiple major league states where 1)the pandemic is out of control and 2)the government is clear that they don’t give a shit. As long as this is true I don’t see how they’re even going to make it through spring summer training.