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MLB 2019-2020 Offseason Thread


Meacon Keaton

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A yet to be identified Yankees minor leaguer has tested positive.

Baseball was allowing players to stay in camps for voluntary workouts if they wanted to, but now those have been stopped too and everyone has been sent home.  The sport is now completely shut down.

Just imagining the season not starting til what would've been the All Star Break or something and the season is just a 2.5 month sprint.  Any team can have a hot two months so it might be the best chance the seeming non-contending teams have to winning a title, albeit nowhere near as satisfying as being the last team standing after 162 games.

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On 12/03/2020 at 16:35, B-li Manning said:

Umpire Angel Hernandez waved to beat writers on the way out of the Yankee complex and said "see you in June!"

I now feel better about the situation since he's wrong literally all the time.

The only thing good about all this is that it means Angel Hernandez and that tool Joe West have less work to do. 

 

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Baseball results are too random to take away too many games. In basketball, the best team is going to win 9 out of 10. In baseball the best team will win 6. The longevity of the season is what separates the best teams from the average from the bottom. It’s the perfect length and I’ll hear none of that. (Go ahead OOC people) 

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I'd be fine with a few less games (154, 148, maybe down to 144 or 140;) but beyond that baseball is too random. The reigning World Series champions started 19-31. They were 41-40 after 81 games. So if you sliced the season in half they probably would not have made the playoffs.

A long season is necessary in a sport like baseball. The season is too long in basketball. In hockey it is arbitrarily exciting because of the 2 pts for a won and 1 or for an OT loss rule. But it's still too long. Football needs 14 games to determine its best teams, everything else is unnecessary.

The only sports that really get it right are soccer leagues that have a full round robin schedule, everyone plays everyone twice. It's the most viable way to determine best and worst. Basketball could and should do this. The NFL can't for obvious reasons. Hockey could do this as well.

But baseball doesn't work that way. You need 9-10 games played between each team to really determine who is better. So if you do a full round robin in each league you wind up with 140 games played and no interleague. I, personally, think that is the perfect approach for baseball. With the winner of each league meeting for a best of 7 World Series. But needless to say we'll never see it.

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29 minutes ago, Your Mom's Side Chick said:

The whole delay is working well for my fantasy team. Verlander is sidelined for 6 weeks and I probably wont lose him for any games if things keep going the way they are

Yeah, right now MLB's said they will be following CDC's guidelines on no 50+ person events for eight weeks, so that's already getting you to early to mid-May before they even launch spring training back up.   Even if you assume players have been staying in shape at home during the delay, you figure teams might need a week or so of workouts and a week and a half/two weeks of games.

So that puts the season into June already and if things don't improve in the next month I could easily see the CDC pushing their guidelines back further.

I mentioned if it started around the normal ASB time it'd be a 2.5 month sprint to the playoffs...but as others have pointed out, baseball isn't built for short seasons.  While the team that wins it all will be happy it's probably not going to look great in the history books to see a champion decided after half a season.

I have no doubt MLB will squeeze whatever baseball out that they can but if they're only playing a half season there will be a lot of purists who would say that they should just fold it up and wait til next year.

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Not sure on other states but yesterday's comments from Cuomo would indicate that if there's baseball this year the Mets and Yankees will be playing in empty stadiums.

I reckon other states will have similar protocol and MLB will need to decide between empty stadiums or no season at all.

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Another major issue that the MLB and MLBPA are trying to work out for this year:  how will service time work?  If there are games, they can probably reach some sort of compromise.  Supposedly the league has said it would grant a full year of service to everybody provided they can get 130 games in.  But with the season not likely to start before June if at all that's already a near impossible number to play.  If games do eventually get played I could see there being some sort of proration (ie:  play half a season, every day on the roster counts as two service days).

But what about the very real possibility of no games?  The Union is pushing for service to be fully granted as if the games were played.

I mean I'm always gonna support the players getting money over the billionaire owners...but from a pure roster construction standpoint there's no denying the teams would be getting screwed big time.  Countless cost-controlled players losing a valuable service year.  Dodgers trade for Betts and might lose him without him ever playing a game.

On the other hand the league would prefer to just freeze the contracts and push everything out a year but that means salaries remain in a holding pattern for a year and for some guys, aging that extra year before free agency might cost them when it's time to hit the market.

It's going to be a mess if there's no games, and if there's a lot of bad blood in these negotiations it only reinforces that a lockout after 2021 is inevitable.

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Each team should just choose a member of the coaching staff to represent them in a digital season using MLB: The Show.

Then, if we get to a point where they can start playing real baseball, they just pick up from where they left off in the game.

I can just see it now... start the season in late July, and you've got some of the powerhouse teams cellar dwelling, while the divisions are all led by teams who were projected to finish 3rd at best in their divisions.

 

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3 minutes ago, Gabriel said:

Each team should just choose a member of the coaching staff to represent them in a digital season using MLB: The Show.

 

Take a page out of Nascar's book. They're doing iRacing on Twitch.

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It would be one thing if they just had a very abbreviated season that was otherwise run conventionally.  But per Jeff Passan, both the league and union remain committed to doing as close to a full schedule as possible provided they are allowed to resume.  The sense is that any return to Spring Training would be very brief and they'd instead start games with expanded rosters of 30-32 players so teams can carry a lot of extra bodies, especially pitchers since the starters won't have the chance to ramp back up.

Expanded rosters could continue all year because the union has expressed a willingness to play weekly doubleheaders, sometimes even two a week.  From a union standpoint this is viewed as a win because it means more guys getting a big league salary all season.  But teams are ostensibly going to have to abandon their 5-man rotation in favor of 6 and 7 man configurations, so teams who already lost starters to injury are going to be at that much more of a disadvantage.  Star players would also be sitting more frequently simply because off days pretty much won't exist.

On top of all that, both sides are willing to extend the season well into October and have cold weather teams play their playoff games in neutral site warm cities.  This might've already been a necessary evil for the NYC teams and other places where large crowds won't be allowed for a while, but the idea of a World Series being played in some random city that has nothing to do with the teams involved is just awkward.

Can't believe I'm saying this but even I think I'd rather have no season than something so gimmicky.

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