Another week, another proposal to salvage the MLB season.
The latest trial balloon is to have the spring training sites turn into regular season venues. Teams and regular season games will be confined to the Grapefruit (Florida) and Cactus (Arizona) leagues.
The whole issue with confined teams playing limited schedules with no long distance travel is logistics. The players are one thing; but the team support staff and third party vendors (hotels, cooks, cleaners, etc) are a large, interlocking swarm of individuals who, if not locked in, will have to be tested daily before game contact.
Undefined is whether each team will start with a 40 man roster. The reason is simple: this summer there appears to be no minor leagues. Clubs are not going to house, fed and train 200 minor leaguers at the same major league lock down facility. It is not cost effective and not needed.
This two-state set up is great, until the summer heat will bake players to a crisp. In June, the average temperature in Phoenix is 104. If you can only have night games to beat the heat, that adversely affects the number of games that can be played. Florida is not much better, as heat plus humidity is a real factor. Florida has two domed stadiums; Arizona has one.
More players are saying that they are against the idea of being team quarantined for four months away from their families.
More fans are upset with the potential realignment causing their favorite team playing harder opponents. The call for a universal DH rule has NL purists upset.
As MLB struggles to figure out what to do, it will probably have to look to what leagues in Asia find as an acceptable solution. Korea and Japan are still on hold, but the small Taiwan league said it was going to start playing games (with no fans).
