Atlanta Braves schedule: how many games will be lost?

As this delay goes forward, it’s more and more likely that the Atlanta Braves will have to forge their own way through whatever season they end up with – fair or unfair.

The Atlanta Braves are in uncharted waters, as is the rest of the sport, of course.

The closest thing major league baseball has to a precedent for what we’re seeing transpire this this year is the 1981 season in which a labor strike marred the schedule. Even so, that comparison has some obvious flaws, as we’ll see.

That 1981 season began normally, on April 8, featuring Cincinnati in their (then) traditional season-opening contest – that year it came against Philadelphia.

However, a strike was declared that brought the season to an abrupt halt in June – knocking out all games between June 12 and August 7.

Once (on-field) hostilities resumed, the season continued to completion on October 4… although technically it came on the 5th after a tie-breaker game was resolved.

Because of the large break, MLB decided to use a 1st half/2nd half approach, with the winners of each half proceeding to the playoffs from each of 4 divisions – ultimately making the Dodgers the World Champs that year.

But it’s the fragmented schedule that was the interesting bit. MLB made no effort to rebalance anything: the lost games were simply ‘lost’ and the others were played out as previously scheduled.

Thus in the first half, there were teams playing as few as 50 games and a couple playing up to sixty.

The second half was equally disparate, with ranges from 48 to 54 games.

Overall, some clubs ended with as few as 103 total contests and as many as 111.

The 2020 season… as much as we can get of it… could be equally unbalanced.