When it comes to figuring out what the 2020 Major League Baseball season will look like it is impossible to predict specifics. But according to a report in The Athletic, MLB is proceeding with the notion that we won't see real games until May at the earliest.
In the piece written by Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich, it states: A day after he chose to delay the start of the season, commissioner Rob Manfred met with the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, Tony Clark, and other top officials in Arizona. The list of issues the sides must resolve is long, with topics ranging from service time and contract bonuses to practical matters of scheduling. At this point, industry sources believe it is unlikely the season will begin before May, which is dependent, of course, on the containment of the virus.
When asked about the plan in terms of ramping back up toward the season after this coronavirus-induced hiatus is over, Red Sox team president Sam Kennedy on a conference call Friday that it was his belief that one option would be to make up lost games toward the end of the season.
"As it relates to the games on the front end, the current thinking at Major League Baseball is that they would be added on the back end of the schedule, but obviously subject to change as the situation develops. We have not canceled any of these games," Kennedy said. "We would be looking at a rescheduling, but clearly subject to change as that develops."
Added Red Sox Chief Baseball Officer Chaim Bloom, "The short answer is we don’t know. We don’t have enough of a sense of what this will look like when we do start up again, what timetable we’ll be on. I don’t even want to speculate. Obviously, this is not something for which we have a playbook. We don’t know exactly what the circumstances will be when we get a chance to start up again."
The start would the latest for a Major League Baseball season since 1995 when the Red Sox' first game fell on April 26 due to the labor stoppage. That season spring training with regular players began on April 7 and ultimately included 11 exhibition games before the start of the regular season.
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