Blue Jays: Is June the best case scenario for baseball to resume?

Baseball players are going to need some time to ramp things back up once baseball resumes, which means that June might be the best case scenario for the beginning of the MLB season.

Since there isn’t a lot to talk about when it comes to baseball, one of the topics floating around social media yesterday was when baseball might actually resume.

Before I go any further, this is purely speculation on my part, and on the part of a few other sources on Twitter. I don’t think anyone knows how long it’ll be until life in North America is normal again, or when professional sports will be able to resume, let alone a bunch of sports writers and fans.

That said, I’d like to think there’s at least some logic to my thinking about how things will go, and I found that most people who were talking about the subject felt the same way. And the main idea was that we can probably already kiss April and May goodbye for the MLB season.

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As things stand right now, MLB has already committed to pushing back the regular season at least two weeks. Since they were slated to start on March 26th, that would mean that the absolute best case scenario would see Opening Day roll round for the weekend of April 11th. As much as I want to believe that’s how things will go down, I think we can already rule that out.

Other leagues like the NBA have kept things more vague, saying they’ll re-evaluate things in 30 days, and to be fair, the situation has changed daily over the last week. There’s a good chance we won’t fully understand the scope of the situation until close to the end of the month, and that might be a better time for leagues to make some decisions.

When when players are cleared to get back in camp and re-start team workouts again, they’re going to need some time before they’re game ready. Sure, players will continue to work out and stay as ready as they can while the league is on hiatus, but there’s only so much they can do. For example, this is the time of the calendar when starting pitchers are throwing 80-90 pitches in an outing, having worked their pitch count up throughout the spring. I’m sure the process will be abbreviated, but they’re going to need some time. And if things go on too long, they may even need to pretty much start over, especially pitchers.

Realistically, I think we’re looking at a 3-4 week period at a minimum before the regular season schedule would get underway, and we don’t even know when that could begin yet. And if the major sports leagues follow the CDC’s recommendation of stopping things for eight weeks, then we’re into the middle of May by then, meaning the regular season wouldn’t start until the middle of June.

Again, this is just speculation on my part, and until we know more about how the governments are going to proceed in Canada and the United States, that’s really all we can do. Here’s hoping baseball will be back before summer rolls around.