It remains to be seen when, or if, the 2020 MLB season will take place, but as of now, the best-case scenario for regular-season baseball is early-mid June.
As for a 162-game season? Highly unlikely.
“There’s no way at this point we’re getting in a 162-game season. It’s already too late for that,” Wall Street Journal MLB writer Jared Diamond said on The DA Show. “But baseball is clearly going to do everything in its power to try to start up sometime, I would guess, in June or July. Play as many games as possible, schedule double-headers, play regular-season games into October, push the playoffs back in November – which would obviously mean needing to play playoff games pretty much entirely at a neutral site as long as any of these cold-weather teams like the Yankees or the Cubs are in the playoffs.
“It’s going to get creative,” Diamond continued. “The playoffs might look different. There might be more teams in it. The structure and the format might be different. The goal is just to get games back. Baseball and the players seem willing to try a bunch of things to do what they can to make it an entertaining season because it’s going to be a shorter one.”
Diamond, the author of “Swing Kings: The Inside Story of Baseball's Home Run Revolution,” said that spring training could start as early as late-May and that the regular-season could begin in early-mid June.
Again, that’s best-case scenario.
“I’m sure they’d love to do that,” Diamond said. “I think we all have to be prepared for the possibility, at least in the beginning of the season, that there’s games with no fans. I think there’s a very good chance the best way to get games on television as fast as possible is to agree to play games in empty ballparks. It sounds like the league and the players are both willing to discuss that – because the goal, as it should be, is to get games back as soon as it is safe to do so. People are sitting at home. It will really mean a lot for people for games to be on television, even if the ballparks are empty. I would expect if there are going to be games anytime soon, that’s the way they’re going to be played.”