Baseball’s Shortened Season Opens; Post Season to be Expanded

Major League Baseball opened the 60 game 2020 regular season with a pair of games on July 23rd, a day ahead of the openers for the other 26 teams.

The Washington Nationals began defense of their 2019 World Series title by hosting the New York Yankees in a spectacular pitching matchup between Washington’s Max Scherzer and New York’s Gerrit Cole. Cole was 20-5 with a 2.50 ERA and a major league leading 326 strikeouts for the Houston Astros in 2019. It seems like 20 years ago, but it was just back in December that Cole signed as a free agent with the Yankees. Cole’s debut with New York went very well; he allowed just one run in five innings pitched and picked up the win as the Yankees beat the Nationals 4-1 in a rain shortened game that ended in the sixth inning. Giancarlo Stanton, who missed most of 2019 with injuries, hit a home run and drove in three runs for the Yankees. Scherzer struck out 11 but allowed all four runs.

In Los Angeles, Enrique Hernandez had four hits including a home run and drove in five runs as the Dodgers beat the San Francisco Giants 8-1. Mookie Betts, acquired in that big off season trade with the Red Sox, was 1 for 5 with a run scored in his Dodger debut.

The games certainly looked different, with no fans present (those cardboard cutouts in the seats behind home plate looked creepy, like those targets that popup in TV cop shows when they are on the firing range) but it’s still great to get baseball back. Let’s hope they can keep Covid-19 at bay.

MLB took the opportunity of the opener to announce that the playoffs will be expanded to 16 teams, eight from each league, with one through eight seedings. The top three seeds in each league will be the division winners, numbers four through six will be the second place teams, and numbers seven and eight will be the two teams with the next best records. There will be no first round byes; everyone will play a best of three opening series (1 vs. 8, 2 vs 7, etc.) with all three games played in the higher seed’s ball park. Winners of this first round will advance to the Division Series and proceed from there in the usual format for the rest of the playoffs and World Series. This playoff format is only for the 2020 season, but of course 2021 is up in the air like everything else due to Covid-19. Permanent changes to playoff format must be negotiated as part of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, which expires after the 2021 season. We like the idea of a best of three Wild Card format instead of the ridiculous one game playoff between the two Wild Cards in each league, so we hope that type of thing sticks around, if not in 2021, then going forward in 2022.