St. Louis Cardinals News: Plan for 2020 expected as soon as next week

Jeff Passan of ESPN.com has reported that a plan for the 2020 season should be submitted soon. What does this mean for the St. Louis Cardinals?

So far, there have just been “plenty of ideas, but no real answers” when it comes to the 2020 MLB season and how it will return. As a St. Louis Cardinals fan like you, a spring without baseball just hasn’t been the same and I am fully in the camp of bring baseball back by any means necessary.

Get weird, get funky, and get us baseball. I think if there’s a world where there is Cardinals baseball being played at Busch Stadium, people are going to be happy no matter the setup.

We know that eventually, a plan had to come to fruition for what the MLB wanted the season to look like in 2020 when everything was deemed safe. It seems that date is coming sooner rather than we may realize. As the headline reads, Jeff Passan, everyone’s favorite ESPN Tweeter, revealed on Get Up ESPN that a plan could be ready to submit to the union next week.

Any plan that the MLB comes up with will have to be approved by the MLBPA of course, but that should be a relatively small hurdle. It’s in everyone’s best interest for games to return and the players are going to have to take a pay cut. With way less money coming in with no fans in stadiums, owners are going to lose a ton of money if players demand their true salaries.

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If teams are truly telling players to ramp up their workouts, this is great news. Even if the start date is delayed until August (some people see around July 1 as very optimistic), it still means baseball in 2020 at some point.

On what plan makes the most sense, Passan writes that there is “momentum toward the league trying to play games in home stadiums.” This is the most realistic option as we have discussed before, so it makes sense for that to be the leading plan.

Beyond the money issue, the plan has to pass hurdles in the form of contingency plans if a player gets sick as well as regulations to protect players in the first place.

Another interesting note in terms of rosters in a shortened season, baseball may go the football/hockey route. “…as many as 50 players will be available for teams to use and that they’ll have active rosters of up to 30 players each game,” wrote Passan. Coming up with a daily or even series-long active roster is a great way for teams to utilize as many players as they could normally, but without the implications of sending a player down.

No matter what the plan looks like, there will be potential pitfalls. The world is a very different and unfamiliar place right now, but getting baseball back would make everything just a little bit more normal.