Doubleheaders Might Be In the Mix When and If Baseball Returns This Season

Like nearly everything else, Major League Baseball is on hold while the world deals with the Covid-19 pandemic. There are a lot of ideas floating around about what baseball will do if conditions allow for a season of some sort to be played. Optimists would say “when” rather than “if” baseball–and all the other sports–return. So with that in mind, here’s a few things being tossed around.

Part of the issue is the fact that there will have to be some sort of Spring Training sequel before any regular season. Players can work out on their own to stay in shape, but it’s agreed that they can’t all just show up for the new Opening Day. A couple of weeks of organized practice involving pitchers actually facing hitters and hitters facing live pitching will need to happen. Baseball is hoping to do that in the middle of May and then open the season around June 1st. That’s probably a best case scenario based on the assumption that the outbreak is well past peak and it’s reasonably safe to resume at least allowing smaller groups to get together for workouts. Whether we’ll be at the point where 40,000 people can get together in a stadium is something else entirely; one solution to that is for early games to be played without fans in the stands. That would be weird, but it could be done.

Whether the season began on June 1st, June 15th, July 1st or whenever, the next question will be how long the schedule would be. The simplest solution would be to simply shorten the schedule to 120 or 100 or however many games would be left on the original schedule when the season starts. The 1995 baseball season was shortened to 144 games due to a labor dispute that year that carried over from 1994.

But both the players and owners have expressed a desire to play as many games as possible. One idea making the rounds is for teams to play more doubleheaders with both games being seven innings, which is what the minor leagues and college baseball do for doubleheaders. In a bygone era, clubs would schedule a small number of doubleheaders during the season; the 4th of July was a popular date for twin bills. Nowadays, traditional doubleheaders–two games for the price of one ticket where the 2nd came is played shortly after the 1st one–have, with very rare exceptions, been replaced by the day/night doubleheader, where one game is played in the afternoon, and the other is at night and each has a separate admission (of course, more money that way). These are frequently used to make up rained out games.

Adding one or two doubleheaders to the schedule, so that eight or nine games per week could be played, would be part of a plan to play a full 162 game slate (or something reasonably close to that). Baseball would probably still need to extend the regular season farther into, or through, the month of October. Along with this, the playoffs and/or World Series could extend past Thanksgiving and possibly into December. This would necessitate playing some or all of the postseason at neutral sites, since a lot of clubs in colder parts of the country do not play in domed stadiums, and open air fields in places like Cleveland, Chicago, or New York would be dealing with cold temperatures and snow. Hence, the World Series would be like the Super Bowl and played at some location other than the home of a participant. Miami has been suggested, for example (no the Marlins will not make the World Series this year).

New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone has said he’s open to the idea of doubleheaders, but that rosters would have to be expanded to add some pitchers, which is reasonable. Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw is a little apprehensive about extending the season into say, December, saying it could affect players the following season, with less recovery time from injuries. He is open to extending the season a few weeks, however.

Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson was nicknamed Mr. October for his post season heroics in the 70s. Perhaps in this year where everything is in an unprecedented upheaval, we will have a Mr. December hitting home runs while we do our Christmas shopping.

And speaking of Mr. October, here’s Reggie Jackson’s three home run game in the 1977 World Series: