The MLB’s season is totally up in the air with the coronavirus concerns lingering. Whether they have a season at all is a question, but it’s a certainty they will have a shortened season even if they are able to play.
The likelihood seems to be that they play anywhere from 60-80 games with 90-100 being very optimistic.
And this brings up an interesting discussion topic to the table. Would the 2020 World Series champion be considered legitimate?
MLB is in a unique spot where, unlike the NBA and NHL which have about 85-90% of their schedules done, the MLB has no games played. And they are only gonna play about half their scheduled games or even less. That’s a detrimental decrease.
Baseball is a sport that needs a ton of games in order to arrive at a legitimate outcome. That’s why they play 162 games and they play nothing but series (besides the outlier of the wildcard game). That’s how the league is decided. To cut the number of games in half causes a situation where it’s hard to determine who the best teams really are. It gets really foggy.
The second half of the MLB season is usually the separation time. The best teams show themselves and the rest just fall. With half or less of the games, there will be no separation time to determine who the best teams really are. There’ll likely be a large middle ground of teams that would either make or miss the playoffs but we don’t have enough information to know whether they are a contender or a pretender.
A team that’s either middling or not that great can have a great three week stretch and be a playoff team while a good team could falter for a couple of weeks and miss the playoffs. The amount of time to make up ground is so much less. And teams do get hot and cold in the MLB more than other leagues, which is another reason they play 162. It gives them the best opportunity to sift out good teams from bad teams that just had a good few weeks. 60-80 games wouldn’t afford that chance as easily.
I look at a team like the Pirates the last couple of years as a great example. In 2018, they went on a huge winning streak around the break and looked like contenders. They wound up faltering late. In 2019 they didn’t go on quite the same run at the break but were at least hanging in at the break before having a very bad second half that saw them only win 24 games. In a shorter season, a team like that would be a legitimate playoff contender that might sneak in even though they aren’t that great of a team.
And the talk of expanding playoffs this year to 12-14 teams doesn’t help. They think it’d help legitimacy but it would do the opposite. You’d be sending even more mediocre to bad teams into the field and it’d make playoff runs seem more illegitimate as beating those teams wouldn’t be seen as “real” playoff wins under normal circumstances. And even in a shortened season, those teams could realistically make a run themselves based and then it becomes a problem as those teams wouldn’t have otherwise made the field. Just imagine one of those extra participants reaches or even wins the World Series. Or a team like the Yankees or Dodgers dispatches them in the fall classic (which might become the winter classic). In either situation, the legitimacy question rears it’s head in again.
With a shorter season also comes some other things. Rosters would be expanded for a bit to accommodate the spring training cutoff then having to rev it up again. Schedule changes and balancing that becomes a concern too, especially if neutral site games have to be played and teams lose home games. There would also be no trade deadline so you wonder how teams would approach that. The trade deadline usually helps that separation time, but that won’t happen in this season. Even if you can make trades any time, more teams would be in it and trading for a player for 15-20 games might not even be worth it this year for anyone, even if there are some teams wanting to trade off rentals. Then there’s the possibility that trades can’t be made in-season at all, which would eliminate any of those possibilities.
This could all be moot if the season is canceled, but I believe there will be baseball this season. It’ll just be different than any baseball we’ve ever seen. And will the team holding up that trophy in November or December be considered legitimate and remembered as a true champion or will they be recognized as a “*champion.” The question of legitimacy will be a story of the MLB in 2020 if there is a season.
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