As I sit here in house quarantine on day 20 something, I think a sense of normality would be good for everybody. When the sports leagues that were in season (NBA and NHL) and baseball which was towards the end of Spring Training started shutting down on March 13, some including the sports leagues thought the stoppage would be a week or two. Well it's more than two weeks and no end in sight. As much as we need to have sports back to help heal the country and provide a welcome distraction from what we're going through and will go through as we go back to life. Before anything happens the medical community has to be on board. Every sports league has been thinking outside the box as to how to get there respective leagues up and running. Most major sports leagues have insurance policies for instances like this but that doesn't help the little guy. How do we get sports up and running in a safe and economically feasible way. Until testing for the Coronavirus (Covid-19) is widely available it won't happen. The leagues have proposed putting all of their teams in some sort of biosphere.
Golf cancelled the British Open, Open Championship scheduled for July, so far that is the only major cancelled. The Masters has been rescheduled for November, the U.S Open is now scheduled for September and the P.G.A is scheduled for August. The Kentucky Derby will take place in September. I believe tennis has moved a few events and NASCAR is promising to reschedule. The WNBA season has yet to begin but they have a little bit of wiggle room due to the Olympics being rescheduled.
The NHL and NBA are kind of in the same boat, as they were finishing up their regular seasons and heading towards the playoffs. In the beginning both leagues vowed to finish their seasons have the playoffs and award the championship trophy. The NBA has proposed putting all of their teams in Vegas and somewhere else to finish, they have also talked about cancelling the season. While the NBA is having talks about what to do with the season, the NHL is having the same discussions. The NHL has proposed putting all of the teams in North Dakota amongst others to finish the season or not finish the season, they've talked about just starting the playoffs. These leagues have to advantage of playing in arenas so wherever they end up playing, they can possibly play into August.
Baseball who's regular season had not yet started at the time of the stoppage, their were about two weeks left in spring training. At the beginning of the week the MLB reported that they were working on a plan to put all the teams in Arizona to play an abbreviated season at the Spring Training sites there and Chase field. This Arizona plan had the medical community on board which is probably the most important thing in this unique situation but from a baseball standpoint there were things left to be desired. To take every major leaguer away from his family for 2-4 months or whatever it ends up being, takes some commitment especially from the veterans who have families. The younger generation of players will be happy to do this, they'll go play on a diamond at the park for fun and a paycheck. Also it is very hot in Arizona during the summer which would mess with conditioning. Players and umpires would break down faster than you thought possible and the quality of this beautiful game would suffer. You would have to have 40 man rosters with at least 15 pitchers for this to work. They were also talking about seven inning doubleheaders (like college), I would be fine with this as long as it's only for doubleheaders and we get nine in every other time. There is a lot to work out if this Arizona plan is going to work. The plan I heard about later puts in Spring Training sites might be a little more feasible. Under this plan the American and National Leagues would be combined into the Cactus and Grapefruit Leagues (Spring Training leagues), we would still have divisions with some interesting divisional matchups (Yankees and Phillies, Athletics and Cubs). Players would still have to leave their families but there's some normalcy here, with playing at your Spring Training site. The Spring Training plan yet quirky is more feasible, at least we have two leagues and can have representative World Series. Just today I heard a report from a news source about playing in Japan.
Whatever any sports league decides to do, it's going to be a strange situation. When leagues come back their might not be fans, neutral sites, announcers might be different. Who would have thought that we would be in this situation, not that we underestimated the Coronavirus (Covid-19) but I don't think many people envisioned the country shutting down. I'll say it again Sports provide a distraction from whatever your dealing with, you can sit down and watch a game for three and a half hours so hopefully we get some form of live sports soon.
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