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More fans will watch on TV as they can't watch in person. I also expect MLB to shorten games and increase playoff teams to keep fans watching longer. You may see them adjust the service time clock to let teams bring up studs early to be competitive. This results in a boatload of ad revenue opportunities they wouldn't normally have.

Traditionalist but this would be so much fun for 1 season.

Exactly. ESPN is re-running the 2008 spelling bee.

The networks are also struggling for new content right now as filming has shut down for most things and NBC has lost the olympics. The major networks would jump at live content right now.

Great article...thanks. With the younger squad and 2 allstar catchers, I would love to see what the Sox would do playing extra double headers. It would be strange to see the games with no crowds but it would be terrific to have live baseball back in any form.

They absolutely will if it's the only way they get paid. This is the one thing that people are blowing way out of proportion. By the time this would theoretically start, the social distancing practices would be lessened. It'll be realistic for these guys to have their families with them in June. Especially in Arizona where there isn't even a stay at home order in place. I love my father. If he had to leave the family for 4 months to make $10 million though, I would've quickly gotten over it.

I did not think of that. I don't mind driving to our local Walmart for that scenario. Thank you.

And this is why I can't stand the people saying it is okay to open the country. These people are completely out of touch. This pandemic effects every family in the country even if no family members have come down with the disease. We need to stop people trying to make money off of phony products and we need leadership to reassure people in a realistic way. This is no time for opportunism and outlandish political ranting. Glenn Beck, My god, there is something wrong with that man.

That would be the smart way to go. This season wouldn't count for anything in terms to teams played, when, and where. So just push the future schedules back a year.

He just screams "likeability" to me.

I think it’s useful to start having these conversations because this billion dollar industry wants to figure out how to run itself in this mess, and without having these first conversations we can’t even figure out what the important problems are. The reaction of the isolated players is clearly one. We’ve also seen in Japan that their league started making preparations to open and then 3 of their players got it, shutting down those preparations. Aside from the fact that the federal government is useless there’s not much we are sure about right now, so you may as well start asking what it would take to open something, what the formats could be, and then watch to see how the problems develop. There are some obvious ones. Just think of basic things. One shortstop gets it, shows no symptoms, they throw the ball around the infield 10 times in a game and now even with distancing everyone on that team is exposed and so is anyone who is tagged at 2b. How do we manage that? I don’t know, but could there be some answer? Maybe. We don’t want every industry to shut down for 18 months, even I don’t want that and I think these idiots are about to kill another hundred thousand because they think they can reopen stuff in 4 weeks. So let’s start thinking through what the issues are, if the whole league doesn’t work then it doesn’t work, but at least we tried.

All I know is we were assured by this administration that the Coronavirus was contained. Shut down. Cases were going down to zero. A spokesman, now press secretary said this President wouldn’t allow the virus in this country. Then they were so unprepared now anything under 100,000 deaths will be celebrated. Could you imagine the tweets we would get from the current POTUS if he were still just a citizen and this same thing was happening with POTUS from either party in charge?