If Major League Baseball manages to pull off a 100-game season around the myriad coronavirus concerns, Matt Spiegel outlined one way it could unfold on his Twitter account.
- Regular season starts July 1, ends Oct. 15.
- No All-Star Game, but Dodger Stadium hosts neutral-site World Series in November as compensation.
- If the Dodgers are somehow in the World Series, Anaheim or San Diego would be considered alternate sites.
Such a season resonates with me as false-hope fuel, especially with places like Virginia and Toronto extending shutdowns late into June, but the league has to prepare for the spectrum of scenarios. If the coronavirus looks largely contained two months from now, there's a plan. If few weeks roll by and July 1 looks laughably optimistic, I'm guessing we'll hear rumblings of a shorter contingency plan, which will probably look as appealing an option as a runaway truck ramp.
(Speaking of the Dodgers, it took six years, but they finally felt compelled to strike a deal with the local carriers in order to make games available to all in-market customers. Maybe relaxed blackout restrictions will be one positive result from the threat of fanless games.)
As it pertains to our concerns, there are numerous White Sox whose South Side careers will be dramatically altered simply due to their contract situations. If the entire season is lost, James McCann would get to hit free agency after an All-Star season, not as a backup to Yasmani Grandal. The memories of Alex Colomé's second-half regression lose some of their freshness. The White Sox don't have to worry about Kelvin Herrera's option vesting, and it's entirely possible that Edwin Encarnación, Gio González and Steve Cishek never appear in a regular-season game because the standards for suitable stopgaps have changed year over year.
For the White Sox who are locked in beyond 2020, baseball really hasn't encountered such a situation since the Korean War, where players miss an entire season due to circumstances beyond their control. The hope is the guys who excelled in 2019 can lock in their gains, the guys who were injured have plenty of time to heal correctly and responsibly, and the guys who were on the verge of decline somehow benefit from the lack of wear and tear. There's just no way of really knowing.
But whether the season is abbreviated or lost, Nomar Mazara's presence on the White Sox seems uniquely affected. Whether we're talking about the season losing 62 or 162 games, those were the games that offered the biggest benefit to all involved. For the White Sox, they could probably live with a slow start because Mazara wouldn't be the only thing holding them back. For Mazara, he'd get one last good chance to see if his setup and swing adjustments could pay dividends without having a younger, more intriguing player breathing down his neck.
The White Sox think he can do more than he did in Texas. Rick Hahn tried to temper expectations when acquiring him, but team personnel over subsequent months have let the guard slip a little. They had plans for him, so much so that they probably wouldn't have given in the urge to platoon him until June. He had hit .364/.462/.545 with an equal number of walks and strikeouts over 26 spring training plate appearances, for what that's worth.
That long runway for takeoff now shortens considerably, because if the White Sox are looking at a 100- or 80-game season, they're justified in counting themselves in the postseason picture. The Sox's postseason odds practically double from a full season to a partial one, so if this season manages to get off the ground, it should be all hands on deck. Mazara's immediate production, or lack thereof, suddenly counts way more than it was supposed to.
And if any version of a baseball schedule is completely out of the question for 2020, then the White Sox will -- or at least should -- be compelled to find a second upgrade for right field without knowing how their first attempt would have panned out. And while DH could be a fallback option if the Sox move on from Encarnación, that just makes Mazara's future as a hitter an even heavier question.
The White Sox didn't seem all that ashamed of acquiring Grandal even though McCann exceeded all expectations as the primary starter, so I'd hope they'd be similarly aggressive in solving right field for good. It'd just be an unsatisfying twist for Mazara, and maybe those of us who had held off on issuing too strong a judgment on the trade because of the non-negligible possibilities. I assume those of us would still take Mookie Betts a million times out of a million.
