© Kelley L Cox | 2017 Sep 11
The Major League Baseball season was supposed to start this week. Instead, we’re most likely looking at months, not weeks, as to when it, and the rest of the sports world can resume, as society at large attempts to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
All of the uncertainty has led to questions of if some leagues will even be able to continue, namely the NBA, whose postseason was supposed to start on April 18.
The MLB certainly has more time to work with before they’d have to cancel their season, but complicating matters is the need to finish the playoffs before winter time, when the weather gets too cold and rainy for the game to be played.
Not so fast according to Giants broadcaster Jon Miller, the “baseball savant” who pitched fellow broadcaster Mike Krukow an idea that would allow baseball to continue into the holiday season.
“‘If they get started late, say around mid-June or July, they play the regular season through October, and then October 31, that’s when the playoffs start,’” Miller told Krukow, who relayed the story to Murph & Mac on Monday.
“I go, ‘Jon, it’s too cold.’ He goes, ‘No. What is the one thing that really prolongs the month of the playoffs? It’s travel back-and-forth. When you have the Giants playing Atlanta you’ve got to go cross-country and back-and-forth. What if this year, we had four teams go to a neutral site that has a dome. Like the four National League teams they go to Arizona, because they have a dome.
“Then you would play two games a day and you would rifle right through the playoffs. The cities that all the teams represent would be a little bummed because they wouldn’t get the playoffs but all of baseball would have baseball to watch, you wouldn’t have it altered by cold weather or inclimate weather…and then you go from there. You keep playing at neutral sites in dome stadiums.’
“I mean Jon has thought this through, and the more he talked about it the more I’m going ‘Hell yeah!’
“In that case we could have baseball all the way through Thanksgiving.”