Take the Cardinals off life support

Rob Manfred should terminate the COVID-wrecked season of the St. Louis Cardinals.

It’s time for Commissioner Rob Manfred to take unprecedented action. It’s time for Manfred to call a halt to the sorry excuse of a team that the 2020 St. Louis Cardinals have become, cancel their remaining games, and declare the results of those few that have been played null and void.

Never in the 144-year history of MLB has a team’s full-season been negated. But never in baseball history have circumstances arisen that even come close to paralleling those in St. Louis.

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A total of 17 team members — 10 players and seven staffers — have now tested positive for COVID-19 since the outbreak was first reported. The latest to do so was outfielder Lane Roberts, a roommate of Ryan Helsley, who had previously tested positive.

Due to the succession of positive tests, the Cardinals have only played five games, none since July 29. They have had 13 games – a fifth of the team’s schedule — postponed, four of them twice.

Makeup dates have yet to be set for eight of those games, primarily because the Cardinals only have two open dates – Aug. 27 and Sept. 3 — remaining on their schedule. And neither the Pittsburgh Pirates nor the Chicago Cubs – two of the teams with games not yet re-scheduled—are available on Sept. 3 because they’re playing one another in Pittsburgh that day.

That means a minimum of four of those six games would have to be re-scheduled as parts of seven-inning double-headers.

The problem is that the Cardinals already have five double-headers scheduled.

The first doubleheader was supposed to be played against the Detroit Tigers on Thursday in Detroit. But that double-header was cancelled Monday. Perhaps fortunately, the Tigers are open on Sept. 3, so it would be possible to re-book that double-header on the Sept. 3 date.

But that creates the very realistic prospect of the Cardinals playing as many as nine seven-inning doubleheaders, all of them in the season’s final month. The problems with this scenario should be sufficiently obvious that they need not be recounted, but for the record…:

• That would leave nearly one-third of St. Louis’ season – 18 of 60 games – consisting of seven-inning contests. That’s a major inequity.
• Depending on how the Cubs and Pirates postponements are re-scheduled, it would cram at least six and possibly all nine of those double-headers into the final 25 days. That kind of grueling makeup schedule would certainly be competitively unfair to the Cardinals.
• But the biggest reason to cancel the Cardinals’ season is the deleterious impact their ongoing postponements are having on other teams. Requiring those teams to play a succession of late-season double-headers is grossly unfair to teams that have followed protocols and whose pitching – and in some cases lineup – plans would be distorted at the latest and most sensitive stages of a pennant race.

That could be a very big deal to teams such as the Cubs and Milwaukee Brewers, both of whom are viewed as prime playoff contenders. It could also grossly impact the Tigers, who are making an improbable run at a post-season berth.

Since MLB is playing games entirely within regions, and largely within divisions, the impact on the standings of removing the Cardinals’ carcass from life support would be relatively minimal. NL Central teams would still all play the same number of games — 50 rather than 60 – so the division’s selection of first and second place post-season qualifiers would be unaffected.

The only issue would be the status of a third-place team relative to “next best record’ teams in other divisions.

The impact would be a bit more significant in the AL Central, where the Royals would be left with a 54-game schedule, two fewer than the Tigers, three fewer than the Indians and White Sox, and four fewer than the Twins.

Obviously, the commissioner could not act unilaterally to nullify the Cardinals’ season; he’d have to get agreement from the MLBPA.

As unlikely as that prospect sounds, he ought to at least try. The ongoing succession of inequities to numerous teams is only made worse by the daily postponements in St. Louis, which at this juncture appear to have no foreseeable endpoint.