Play Ball! MLB 60 Game Regular Season To Start Weekend Of July 24-26

After nearly a month of acrimonious negotiations, Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association agreed on health and safety protocols which will allow for a pandemic-shortened 60-game regular season to take place for 2020.

According to MLB, opening weekend will be July 24-26 with the end of the regular season slated for September 27. Players will begin reporting now for spring training 2.0 but can arrive no later than July 1. All players will be tested for COVID-19, first, before anything else happens. The start of spring training 2.0 is slated for July 3.

When spring training restarts it will have been 103 days since it was shut down.

The first announcement of the agreement came by way of the MLBPA at 8:40 pm ET on Twitter in which they simply said, “All remaining issues have been resolved and players are reporting to training camps.”

Commissioner Rob Manfred later said, “Major League Baseball is thrilled to announce that the 2020 season is on the horizon. We have provided the Players Association with a schedule to play 60 games and are excited to provide our great fans with baseball again soon.”

The 60-game regular-season schedule is currently being reviewed by the MLB Players Association. The release of the schedule to the public is not yet known. The proposed schedule will see 40 games played against division rivals, with the remaining portion of each club’s games against their opposite league’s corresponding geographical division (i.e., AL East vs. NL East, AL Central vs. NL Central and AL West vs. NL West), in order to mitigate travel. The vast majority of clubs are expected to conduct training at the ballparks in their primary home cities.

For the regular and postseason the league has the right to move games to site-neutral locations based on feedback from health and infectious experts should a COVID-19 outbreak necessitate it.

High-risk players will be able to opt-out of play with pay. And while players that are not high-risk, may have a spouse that is high-risk or someone living with a spouse who is pregnant can opt-out of play, they would not be paid for the missing games. As an example, Mike Trout’s wife is currently pregnant so if he were to opt-out he would not see prorated pay for the season.

Clubs would be able to invite as many as 60 players to spring training.

When play resumes it will look like nothing MLB has seen before.

For one, the number of players allowed will shift throughout the season

The injury list will be 10 players. But how long is now wide-open:

There will be some historic changes done for health and safety that are bound to give purists fits.

The National League will see the designated-hitter for the first time as part of the 2020 season. To minimize the length of games, after the 10th inning, a runner will be placed on second base in an effort to speed games up. The use of the runner on second base in extras will only take place in the regular season. Should the league dodge the bullet with COVID-19 and make it to the postseason, all games will be played traditionally with no inning limits.

At the ballpark, the environment will be a shock for many of the players. No players are allowed to arrive at the ballpark earlier than 5 hours before game time and must exit the ballpark 90 minutes after the games end.

Players will not be able to spit or use chewing tobacco:

What appears to be missed out of an inability of the sides to reach an agreement on the economics, thus forcing Manfred to impose a 60-game regular season is expanded teams in the postseason. That would generate a wealth of new revenues. Also lost were sponsor patches on uniforms, another new revenue stream. And fans could have been treated to players being mic’d up during games, such as what was done during spring training this year before being shut down.

MORE FROM FORBESInside ESPN’s Effort To Get MLB Players Mic’d Up For Spring TrainingBy Maury Brown

Other unknowns include whether the players will get $33 million in forgiveness of the $170 million advances on salaries for April and May and $25 million in postseason pool money.

And, the league will kill two birds with one stone when it comes to replay rooms. One is to address social distancing. The other is to keep sign-stealing controversy at bay.

Those that cover the game in the media are still waiting to see how the MLB pandemic landscape will be. Sources that wish to remain anonymous to allow them to talk freely about the matter say that broadcast teams will do away games from their home ballparks by watching a feed. Less certain is how writers will be allowed to cover games.

But, for all the strangeness, there will, indeed, be a start to a season. Whether COVID-19 derails that is anyone’s guess. In hoping it is not a harbinger of what is yet to come, just after it was announced that the 60-game regular season was on, Colorado Rockies star Charlie Blackmon and two other players on the team tested positive for COVID-19.