MLB

[spike]

just have a home run derby to decide the championship

[96583UP]

please just pull the plug

I mean the NFL is sweating too, right?

there's no way the NFL season is gonna work, based on what is happening to MLB

unless they just open the rosters up to walk-ons throughout the season

by week 16 there will be one player per team that is actually on the Madden video game

baseball players don't even need to get close to each other to play the game

NFL players are all up in each other's asses all day and night and in my dreams and daydreams

[elliseamos]

Right. I mean, up until that 2nd "and" in that last sentence.

[96583UP]

every 'and' in the last sentence is absolutely essential

[96583UP]

if it's all walk-ons all season, Belichick will be on cloud 9

the Pats will go perfect season with a bunch of D3 auto mechanics

he should just retire after that one

it will be his opus

[Mickey]

I do love the new extra-innings rule and I think MLB should lean into this for the rest of this clown season. Put a guy on 2nd every inning who cares. Blindfold the pitchers. Let's have some fun.

[Bammer]

just have a home run derby to decide the championship

[Biff Pocoroba]

Cardinals/Brewers postponed; another block pulled from the jenga stack.

[Mickey]

Two players on the Cardinals have it. They last played the Twins on Wednesday.

[philpritchard]

0.4%. It's fine.

[Simple Torture]

Red Sox just slid back into playoff contention at 3-4. Let's keep this going, baby!

[E.H. Ruddock]

0.4%. It's fine.

[numbers]

It is fucking immoral that this season hasn’t been at least suspended, they are three fucking teams down.

[Norah]

This is Fine

https://theathletic.com/1961767/2020/07 ... s-is-fine/#

By Andy McCullough Jul 30, 2020 143
Rob Manfred, the sure-handed steward of Major League Baseball, sat inside the MLB Network studios on Monday. He was asked, quite rudely, if the crisis wrought by a COVID-19 outbreak on the Miami Marlins qualified as “baseball’s worst nightmare.”

It was enough to make you wonder if these reporters even like baseball. Anyway, the commissioner nipped that one in the bud.

“I don’t put this in the nightmare category,” Manfred said. “I mean, obviously, we don’t want any player to get exposed. It’s not a positive thing. But I don’t see it as a nightmare. We built the protocols to allow us to continue to play.”

Maybe the commissioner is right. Maybe this conflagration — which on Thursday expanded to 17 infected players who have now contracted a contagious respiratory illness that has caused the death of more than 150,000 Americans — isn’t reason to panic. Maybe it will become a learning experience, as Dodgers president Stan Kasten suggested. Maybe the naysayers raising questions about the ethics, logistical efficacy and competitive integrity of the 2020 season are just a bunch of grumpy sportswriters who actually hate the sport they cover. Maybe!

In fact, maybe we just need to embrace the strange in 2020. Maybe we need to try to find the good in this baseball season.

Let’s give it a shot, shall we?

Start with the finish. Most seasons are played with the certainty that a champion will be crowned. The 2020 season doesn’t fall into that same rut. Will there be a World Series? No one knows, which adds excitement to the daily routine. Every game might be a team’s last. What better way to ensure urgency?

As the cliché goes, the baseball season is a grind — but it also can be a bore. You can check the schedule and always know what comes next. It feels stifling, as if your whole life has been mapped out for you. No one wants that. So consider the fortune of the Phillies and the Yankees. The Phillies are supposed to play the Marlins next week, but they might have to play another team instead. In lieu of an official announcement by MLB, Yankees manager Aaron Boone revealed on Wednesday that the Phillies would actually play … the Yankees! Possibly. Uncertainty is the spice of life, as when the Phillies workouts on Thursday were canceled after a coach and a clubhouse attendant tested positive.

It is every kid’s dream to spend the summer abroad, far from home, seeing the sights of a foreign land. So how lucky are the Toronto Blue Jays? What an adventure they have ahead of them, bouncing around hotels until they can move into extended-stay rental properties in Buffalo in August. Every day, you wake up feeling like Sal Paradise on Chippewa Street. They don’t know when the Canadian government will let them return, but why go home when you hope the summer never ends?

The sense of discovery also extends to the emotions of the participants. Big-league executives usually fret about wins and losses, deadline deals and waiver-wire claims. Now they get the added dimension of wondering about the safety of their players, coaches and staffers on the road. No team wants to end up “experiencing challenges,” as Marlins owner Derek Jeter put it. One executive told us earlier this week he was “really nervous” about his team traveling across a country ravaged by the coronavirus. Nationals manager Dave Martinez admitted something similar. “I’m going to be honest with you,” he said. “I’m scared.”

Another fun quirk is you never know how the rules might be applied. One thing that seemed clear in the 2020 operations manual was that bench-clearing brawls were unacceptable. “Fighting and instigating fights are strictly prohibited,” the manual reads. “Players must not make physical contact with others for any reason unless it occurs in normal and permissible game action.”

So when the Astros and Dodgers dugouts emptied Tuesday, it was reasonable to expect punishment for both teams. But there wasn’t an actual fight, and the two sides never actually made contact, so they were spared. The messages were instead delivered to Dodgers reliever Joe Kelly, who threw behind Alex Bregman and jawed with Carlos Correa, and manager Dave Roberts.

Kelly got suspended for eight games, which seems like a long time in a 60-game season. The length of the punishment sure got people talking. On Twitter, a new trending topic emerged: “The MLB.” Kelly’s suspension also inspired some fellow athletes to use their social-media accounts to connect with the fans.

“What a joke,” former Angels pitcher Jered Weaver tweeted.

“MLB siding with/protecting a team that openly and knowingly cheated their way to a World Series,” Mets pitcher Marcus Stroman tweeted.

“I can’t believe wtf is going on the @MLB right now …” Indians pitcher Mike Clevinger tweeted. “I’m just as lost as all of you at home.”

There is no such thing as bad publicity.

After the abbreviated excitement of Summer Camp to prepare for games, a new crop of stars is being harvested before our eyes. The sudden, debilitating injuries to All-Stars like Justin Verlander, Corey Kluber and Miles Mikolas just opened doors for Cristian Javier, Kolby Allard and Daniel Ponce De Leon. You can see the studs of tomorrow — today.

And today might come faster than you think for the minor-leaguers, even the ones who were whisked away without warning to the Alternate Sites.

“Like we’ve seen with the Marlins here lately, and some other teams, you’re one test away from being in the big leagues,” Brewers pitcher Brett Anderson said Wednesday. “So you’ve got to be all hands on deck, ready to go.”

This has been a season unlike any other. That’s why Major League Baseball commissioned that operations manual with rules and restrictions for the year. It lasts 113 pages, which is a lot to read, but the authors used a neat trick to maintain suspense. The document is quite thorough, unless you are looking for explicit instructions on how to handle an outbreak, like an objective threshold of infections that would trigger a shutdown. The lack of a defined standard gives you an incentive to keep going all the way to the end. You know what they say in show business: You have to leave the people wanting more.

So there you have it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or, in this case, the commissioner. A nightmare? No way. If you squint just right, this might all seem like a dream.

[Simple Torture]

See you guys when pitchers and catchers report in February.

[lennytheweedwhacker]

man...i've really enjoyed watching this scrappy giants team play on tv way more than normal too

[Bammer]

Oh no. Professional athletes in their 20’s have a virus that doesn’t affect them in the slightest.

[E.H. Ruddock]

Season will be called by Tuesday

[spike]

man...i've really enjoyed watching this scrappy giants team play on tv way more than normal too

*braves

[lennytheweedwhacker]

man...i've really enjoyed watching this scrappy giants team play on tv way more than normal too

*braves

no...the braves have always been all over tv here