Top three reasons fans at MLB playoffs are a terrible idea

Competitive balance

Secondly, let’s talk competitive balance, and how MLB is showing every sign of having been a D student in high school science.

While the NBA has been the most dramatic example, all of these empty stadiums are basically laboratory experiments. Plenty of controls in place, the only variable being the road team. And even that road team, by the end of the experiment, has been to that particular lab multiple times and similar ones sixty times.

Baseball itself is, more than any other sport, all about routines. Players know what to expect, grinding it out over as many as 162 games in a full season. During a regular year, it would be received as insanity to propose suddenly dramatically changing anything with the actual playing conditions just in time for the most important games of the season.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what MLB and Rob Manfred are proposing. Players have not had to play in front of fans since March. For the rookies, they will suddenly be asked to play in front of crowds for the first time as professionals. This is not the same as attendance spiking at the ballpark once playoff time comes around. This is a dramatic change in how the experiment of playing professional baseball has been conducted to this point, and it’s an unfair shift at this point in time. Players will say all the right things in the weeks ahead…but for many, it will just be because it’s what they’re expected to say.

Understandably, players are supposed to be playing in front of fans. However, this is not just any season- it’s the 2020 season. The Covid-19 shortened season. These stadiums have been empty for a reason. And while I’m sure some players will be legitimately jazzed about the adrenaline high of playing in front of thousands of paying customers, I’m equally sure that just as many, if not more, players are going to have a serious nagging question about health and safety in the back of their minds they haven’t had to worry about since they were driving home from spring training when baseball was shutdown.

Players shouldn’t have to spend a second thinking about that- all their focus should be on the opponent in front of them and the game at hand. Pressure of a packed house is something you sign up for when you put on a major league uniform. Fearing for your safety is not. If fans had been there in reduced numbers even for just the past month, it would be one thing. This idea is something else entirely.

This entire postseason is a product of the conditions that created it. So it should be conducted under those same conditions.