Coronavirus Update: Are We Going To See A 2020 MLB Season?
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- There's talk that the NFL season could go on as planned, but the future could be worse for fans of other sports.
President Donald Trump held a conference call with 13 major sports commissioners Saturday to talk about the coronavirus and its impact on the sports world.
According to reports, he expects to see fans in seats in August and he doesn't believe the NFL season will be impacted.
Of course, that starts in September. But what about baseball?
CBS2's Steve Overmyer spoke with Jared Diamond, the national baseball writer for the Wall Street Journal, and asked him point-blank, "Are we going to see a 2020 baseball season?"
"I think at this point 100 games would be a great thing, if there's any chance we could get 100 games in. Unfortunately, with every day that goes by, it starts seeming harder and harder to imagine what this season is going to look like. I think every baseball fan has to be prepared, at least starting to prepare mentally, for the worst case scenario that there is no season," Diamond said.
Diamond wrote a book called "Swing Kings: The Inside Story of Baseball's Home Run Revolution," so Overmyer asked how baseball is going to handle a season where the stats don't measure up against every other season.
"It's going to be weird, of course. Let's say it's an 80-game season, again, hypothetically, the numbers are gonna be weird. We won't be able to really put them in any sort of historic significance because there's never really been an 80-game baseball season before," Diamond said.
He went on to note that, in terms of sports, baseball can have a "restorative impact" on society and has filled that role before.
"Just having baseball back, no matter how weird it looks, no matter how sort of strange the statistics are, it won't matter as long as there's baseball on our TVs. I think that'll really mean a lot for a lot of people in this time. I know it would for me. I'm desperately missing baseball and just being able to turn on my TV right now and see a game, even with no fans in the ballpark, even if it's in a spring training stadium in Arizona somewhere, which all of these are possibilities, that would be meaningful to me," Diamond said.
We all know the return of sports isn't the most important thing right now, but hopefully when it does return someday, it'll bring with it a sense of normalcy.
