MLB Needs To Forget 2020 Or Use This Time To Try New Rules

Due to COVID-19 still posing as a threat to public health, the potential major league baseball season is shrinking everyday. It’s time for MLB to step up and make a decision. So far we’ve seen several options. The most recent is to have all the teams play at their own spring training facilities and create new leagues: Cactus and Grapefruit as opposed to National and American. You can read a good piece by Bob Nightengale here about all of this. This would mean the Giants and Dodgers would not be in the same division. Nor the Red Sox and Yankees. Although the idea of playing teams you normally would never see is enticing, it ruins the sanctity of baseball.

That’s the biggest issue for me. Baseball is America’s rock. If you want to see how America is doing, look at how baseball is doing. If there’s no baseball being played at any level, something is wrong. Something is very wrong. If you try to play it while America is broken, it doesn’t play right. Like a scratched CD.

Also, and perhaps most importantly, are the stats. If you play a shortened season or a season in different ballparks, that’s going to throw a wrench in it. We can compare this to the shortened 1994 season when the players went on strike. All teams played about 115 games that year. Look at these standings!

We were looking at an Expos vs. Yankees World Series! Can you imagine a sold out Olympic Stadium in Montreal as they hosted Game 1? Neither can I! And that’s why we need to halt this season before it begins. Every stat, every win, will lead to the question, “What if…” We need to prevent the what ifs. I realize that in 1994, the postseason was cutoff and in 2020 we would still have one, but the number of games wouldn’t be sufficient. It’s not like we’ve lost a week. We will have lost over a month and that is enough time to change a guy’s numbers drastically.

For instance, look at Matt Williams‘ 1994 season. After 112 games he was leading the National League in home runs with 43! He was on pace for 60! Can you imagine if he played 50 more games? Jeff Bagwell (who won the MVP that year) was on pace for a monster season as he lead the NL in almost every offensive category (UPDATE: Bagwell broke his hand on Aug 10 and would have been done anyway). Tony Gwynn was batting .394! What if he- no. Nope. Let’s learn from what 1994 taught us. If a guy’s having an incredible season and you cut him off, for the rest of eternity all people will say is what he was “on pace” for. On pace for doesn’t go down in the history books. Only the numbers you have physically produced. 2020 will need to have an asterisk next to it if we play a shortened season.

If I was an MLB player that had to ride the bus all over Florida for 4 months playing games in front of a crowd of zero and eventually won the “Cactus vs. Grapefruit” World Series, I wouldn’t be excited. It doesn’t hold the same weight. It wouldn’t. It would be a pretend World Series. For the rest of your life when people would talk about it all you could say is, “Yeah, that was the corona year…” and shrug it off.

Major league baseball needs to be played in major league parks in front of major league fans. Can you imagine spending your whole life as a baseball only to be fouled off into an empty stadium where no kid can claim you? What a terrible existence. Let’s avoid the silliness of trying to start a real season during a pandemic. How are you going to control 700 players over that period of time to make sure they don’t come in contact with someone who’s carrying Covid? How? How!?

This is why MLB needs to dismiss the 2020 season and hold off for an official Opening Day that fans can attend. Hopefully in March of 2021.

However…. If major league baseball DOES decide to play this is what they should do.

Play exhibition games. These games will not matter. There will be no permanent stats. They will be treated as spring training games. Here’s where it gets interesting. You know all those rules MLB is thinking about implementing over the next 3 years? Here’s where you get to try all that stuff for a long period of time!

Use a clock to keep the pace moving. Use “robot umpires”. In extra innings, try starting with a runner on 2nd. Maybe on a wild pitch the batter can attempt to run to first instead of just the baserunners advancing. Bring back the 4 pitch intentional walk, I don’t know. The point is, they have 6 months of the year to see how the players acclimate to these new changes. At the end, they run a poll and every player, coach, and manager can give you their thoughts.

What better time to use real MLB talent for experiments like this? Maybe some players want to try stuff they’ve never done before in a big league game. Perhaps Aaron Judge tries batting left handed for a series. Maybe Mike Trout can try pitching. Bring Scherzer in to close, stick Molina in center field, and put Barry Bonds in the Hall of Fame. Let’s see some wild stuff!

The point is, MLB has an extremely, extremely rare opportunity to try all these new advances in rules and technology and there is literally no better time to implement them while getting a huge sample size. But they have to act quickly. Even if they announced today that they would try to get a season in, we would be waiting over three weeks for first pitch.

If MLB decides against playing an exhibition season, I hope they decide to cancel the 2020 season altogether and we can set our sights on Opening Day 2021 when Mike Trout takes the mound for the Angels.