As Major League Baseball grows increasingly optimistic there will be a 2020 season in some capacity, more and more ideas of what exactly a campaign would look like appear to be taking shape.
For well over a month now, the league reportedly has been kicking around all sorts of ideas — from playing all games in Arizona to hosting seasons at spring training facilities. And that’s just a sampling of the reported ideas from recent weeks.
But in a story published Saturday by the Tampa Bay Times’ Marc Topkin, MLB does have a “preferred plan” in mind.
The preferred plan would be to start play in late June or early July with as many teams as possible playing in home parks, such as the Rays at Tropicana Field, while competing in their regular divisions with an abbreviated schedule of at least 80 games.
The Arizona scenario, in which all players and staff would essentially live and play in a colonized bubble, is much less likely. So, too, is having all teams play at spring sites and compete in Cactus and Grapefruit leagues. Other reports about having teams assigned to “hub” sites in Arizona, Texas and Florida, or realigned into three geographical divisions, are being downplayed or dismissed.
The league reportedly is hoping to have a plan in place by the end of May, so we probably can expect more reports like these trickle out over the coming weeks.
