White Sox, Cardinals to play doubleheader after Friday's game postponed

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The St. Louis Cardinals haven’t played a game since July 29.

But that’s scheduled to change, with two games against the White Sox on the same day.

The Cardinals, who have experienced 18 positive COVID-19 tests among players and staffers in recent weeks, are scheduled to finally return to action Saturday in a doubleheader with the South Siders at Guaranteed Rate Field. First pitch for Game 1 is scheduled for 1:10 p.m.

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The two teams were originally scheduled to begin a three-game series Thursday, with the Field of Dreams game in Iowa. That nationally televised showcase event was pushed to 2021 due to logistical reasons caused by the pandemic. That forced a switch to a regular three-game weekend set on the South Side, the first game of which, set for Friday night, was postponed after another Cardinals staffer reportedly tested positive Thursday.

So it will be three games in two days, the start of a Chicago-baseball marathon for the Redbirds, who will play eight games — including a trio doubleheaders — in five days against the White Sox and Cubs.

The Cardinals have seen 18 straight games postponed after playing just their fifth game of the season to cap a two-game set with the Minnesota Twins at the end of July. That’s a total of four entire series and three doubleheaders.

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They’ve been out of action for two weeks, and that’s a pretty big hole blown in what was already a shortened and compressed 60-game schedule. The daunting task ahead of trying to make up so many games in such a brief amount of time before the regular season ends Sept. 27 has generated talk of imbalanced records across the league and what Major League Baseball might have to do should numerous teams finish the year without having played the same number of games.

Obviously, that could have a dramatic effect on playoff seeding in the expanded postseason fields, which grew to include eight teams in each league. While it might sound like a quick fix to simply pluck the Cardinals out of the running for a playoff berth in the National League, doing so would create even more headaches for the teams who were supposed to play them. That includes the White Sox and all their AL Central rivals, putting them in a wildly different situation than teams from the AL East and AL West, with whom they are competing for wild card spots. And it could change things within the AL Central race, too, with the Detroit Tigers waiting to find out when they'll play the four-game series they were supposed to play against the Cardinals last week.

And so the Cardinals will attempt to resume their season Saturday on the South Side. Though like everything involving the 2020 Major League Baseball season, and the Cardinals' campaign in particular, things have the potential to change in a hurry.


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