What my Atlanta Braves and MLB schedule would look like
By James Kunkle
March 26th has passed, that was supposed to be one of the best, most beautiful day’s of the year as the Atlanta Braves were supposed to start off the season against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Yet we sit here with no baseball for at least the next six weeks.
Obviously these are unprecedented times that many people have never experienced anything like before. Realistically sports and baseball should still be on the back burner, but for much of us, that’s not how this works. We want our Atlanta Braves baseball. We are dreading for normalcy and for many of us, that lies within the beautiful game of baseball.
So again, as we have now passed our scheduled opening day, the question now turns to what do we do now about the scheduling. Commissioner Rob Manfred has already made it clear that the season will not be 162 games and as of now, he is like the rest of us, hoping baseball can resume around the mid-May point.
Warning before we delve too far into this, but this whole article is going to be based on the hope that we will start activities at that point in the month of May.
Also before we get going, there has been a lot of ideas and rumors about extending the season closer to Christmas. I think that would be a terrible idea as it would all but mess up the start of the 2021 season in my opinion. My goal is to try and limit the damages here as much as possible.
With that being said, let’s get to my proposal for the 2020 schedule.
First off, I would get the teams together for workouts and inter-squad games starting on May 15th, which with my proposal of a June 1st opening day, would give all players a tad over two weeks to get (re)prepared for the start of the 2020 season.
I would allow all teams to go ahead and adopt what would have been the rules for September call ups this year as I would let all teams start off with 28 players on the roster.
Let’s go ahead and get some of the other details out of the way.
- The All-Star game and all festivities would take place on the Saturday before Memorial Day. Since it’s a popularity contest anyway, might as well just let the fans vote on it like normal and let the coaching staff fill out the rest of the roster.
- Scrap the schedule that was already out and completely redo it. I would avoid interleague games as much as possible (you have to have at least one a day because of the odd number of teams in each league).
- To limit travel as much as possible and not risk fatigue setting in quick, I would have every team, including the Atlanta Braves, go to every other in-league stadium once, and I would schedule it where it would all be done in 1 road trip. For example, the Atlanta Braves would go out West only 1 time and play all 5 teams over the course of 10 to 12 days. Same thing for the Central.
- Expanding further into that, this is obviously going to take a lot of moving parts and agreement to get done on all teams parts. It would have to be something like the Atlanta Braves and Washington Nationals go out west or central at the same time and play the opposites (Example would be the Atlanta Braves playing the Giants while the Nationals play the Padres, then one would play the Diamondbacks while the other plays the Dodgers)
- I would push back the trade deadline to August 14th.
- I would devote every Saturday to being nothing but seven-inning doubleheaders
- Each team would only get two off days a month.
With that plan in mind, it would break down to this.
June would see each team play 32 games.
July would see each team play 33 games while August would host 34 games.
September would then still be the stretch run and host 32 games.
All in all, the Atlanta Braves would end up playing all the other NL East teams about 12 times apiece still this season. Making each division game that much more crucial.
All said and done, the 2020 MLB schedule would still be a grind at 132 games. In my eyes, that’s about as close as realistically possible to the 162 normal game schedule as we can see.
Both Wild card games could be played on October 2nd, which would be a Friday night, so it would not be a huge thing if one game started later in the evening. That would also allow the playoffs to start on Sunday, October 4th.
Maybe this is the time to try something drastic and go for a ton of changes? Maybe it isn’t? However, if I was in Rob Manfred’s shoes, this is the type of thing I would be pushing for.
How about you? Let us know in the comment section below.