Apparently, MLB leaks by “officials” are primary features of this particular baseball season, and the latest seems…well, you decide.
OK, OK, forget all that business about the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues the last MLB leaks were about roughly two weeks ago. Apparently, a couple of significant players decided they were important enough, or rich enough, to say, “Wait: Do I want to go into isolation in Florida or Arizona for an extended period of time?
“I don’t think so.”
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This is not to be rude about Mike Trout or Clayton Kershaw, who reportedly pushed back against the original plan to start up MLB leaked to Bob Nightengale at USA Today. Who would want to do what they didn’t want to?
Never mind, never mind. Now that you can be infected with COVID-19 in Georgia by a manicurist, MLB has different possible plans that were, once again, leaked to Bob Nightengale.
This time the potential plan involves abolishing the two current MLB leagues and re-arranging all the teams into three 10-team divisions based on geography. This would be to restrict travel and allow play at the teams’ actual home fields, or at least for some of the season.
The season in the most optimistic scenario would begin in late June.
At least until the next MLB leaks from “officials.”
Does anybody need to see the East, Central, and West divisions listed? Probably not, once you know that the southern-most city in the East is Miami, the eastern-most city in the Central is Atlanta, and the eastern-most city in the West is Houston.
There are exactly four things interesting about this besides the wrangling about pay cuts: 1) For the first time since the 1960s, there is the possibility of teams finishing 10th; 2) the East division would include both New York teams; 3) the Central division would include both Chicago teams, and 4) no, not the two “Los Angeles” teams being in the West, but this question: Who is talking to Bob Nightengale?
No doubt, roughly 100 games for each MLB team would be quite welcome by their fans. All MLB leaks assumed to be actual are welcome. However, how do we know they’re actual? Well, they show up in USA Today, for example.
This didn’t stop one of our editors to declare in internal communications four hours after Nightengale’s report, “Can’t trust that guy, but every once in a while, he ends up being correct.”
Fans can only hope this, the most desperately hopeful of MLB leaks, truly comes to fruition.
The main problems are the current COVID-19 infection rates in Eastern cities in particular. Can the Philadelphia Phillies actually come home to play, for example, when the number of new infections at the end of June is roughly three times the number currently allowed by state guidelines for easing stay-at-home restrictions?
That three times estimate is mine alone, and very, very, very optimistic. On Apr. 24 the rate of infections in Philly over a 14-day period (how the state will count them) was seven-to-eight times the target number.
So, there’s that.