In announcing its cessation of operations Thursday, Major League Baseball said that the start of the 2020 season would be delayed "at least two weeks."
It sounds like the actual delay might be a whole lot longer than two weeks.
Certainly, from the moment that statement was released, a two-week delay to the beginning of the regular season seemed like nothing but the best-case scenario. The situation involving the COVID-19 pandemic would have to improve dramatically across the United States for that rosy outlook to end up becoming reality.
And according to one national reporter, it sounds like staging Opening Day on April 9 — two weeks after the originally scheduled season-start date of March 26 — isn't very realistic at this point.
"From everybody that I speak to," ESPN's Jeff Passan said Friday morning, asked on TV whether April 9 was a realistic start date, "players, executives, officials, people at the union, the answer is no. And if there is baseball on April 9, something went really, really well across the country.
"But the expectation at this point among almost everybody, is that we're not going to see baseball until May.
"Now baseball bought itself a little bit of time by saying, 'We're going to suspend things for two weeks and reevaluate.'
MLB
"But as we saw yesterday, the reevaluation can happen instantaneously. The news cycle here and the decision-making matrix is moving so quickly that the idea that we know what's going on two hours from now, let alone two weeks from now, just is not the case."
That's tough for baseball fans to hear, that the season could end up being delayed more than a month. But it's also in line with some of the other decisions being made across the country, and even locally.
Governor J.B. Pritzker on Thursday asked that no sporting events be held in Illinois until May 1. That date is obviously more than two weeks away, but in the end, it might not end up being vastly longer or any longer than MLB needs to delay the start of the season.
A potential delay of more than a month also prompts many questions: Will baseball need to restructure the schedule to assure an even playing field for teams chasing a playoff spot? Will the season end up being fewer than 162 games, like the 144 regular-season games teams played in 1995 coming off the strike? If playoff games get pushed into November or even December, will they need to be played at neutral sites in warm-weather cities or in stadiums with roofs? Will players need a second round of spring training, no matter how brief, to get their bodies ready after a potentially lengthy delay?
That's all unknown at the moment.
Delaying the start of the season was the right thing to do amid a public-health crisis. But the longer the delay lasts, the more questions arise about how the 2020 season will end up looking.
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