Major League Baseball will hold Opening Day either July 23 or 24, and players will head to training camps in a week after the league and the union on Tuesday agreed on health and safety protocols that will govern the sport as it attempts to return amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Nearly three months of frustrating and failed economic negotiations ended with the league implementing a 60-game season that will run through Sept. 27 and feature a number of new elements — and the same 10-team playoff structure it has used for almost a decade.
The season’s success probably depends on MLB’s ability to contain coronavirus spread, an issue the health and safety protocol covers in immense detail. Addressing everything from travel to social distancing to a ban on spitting, the manual is a strict guide for a potential 2020 season and illustrates the difficulty of pulling off such an endeavor.
If it can, MLB in 2020 will look radically different:
- Teams will play their four divisional opponents 10 times and each of the five interleague opponents in the same geographical area four games apiece.
- The National League will use a designated hitter.
- In extra innings, teams will begin with a runner on second base.
- The trade deadline will be Aug. 31, less than a month before the regular season is scheduled to end
- Rosters will start at 30 men for the first two weeks, then go to 28 for the next two weeks and stay at 26 for the remainder of the season.
- Teams will have a taxi squad that allows them to have as many as 60 players available to play in major league games.
- There will be a special COVID-19 injured list with no minimum or maximum length of time spent on it, while standard injured list stints will be for 10 days, and the typical 60-day stint will instead be for 45 days.