MLB commissioner Rob Manfred on why a longer season was never possible

MLB players are reporting to camp on July 1 after weeks of exhausting negotiations between MLB and MLBPA produced an agreement on a 60-game 2020 season that is sure to produce a champion labeled with the biggest asterisk since… well, the 2017 Houston Astros. The MLBPA fought for a longer season, but according to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, there was never any realistic chance of a season exceeding 60 games, regardless of the state of negotiations.

Manfred said in an interview with Dan Patrick on Wednesday that if he could do it all over again, he would have made it clearer in MLB’s initial agreement with the MLBPA in March that a renegotiation would be necessary if it was determined that fans could not attend games in 2020, which eventually happened. Yet Manfred says that even if the two sides had come to an agreement earlier, the current state of coronavirus outbreaks across the country would have prevented a longer, more representative regular season.

“I know some people have talked about longer seasons, ’60 is too short.’ The reality is we weren’t going to play more than 60 games no matter how the negotiation with the players went or any other factor. 60 games is the outside of the envelope given the realities of the virus. I think this is the one thing that we come back to every single day. We’re trying to manage something that has proven to be unpredictable and unmanageable. 

…. We’re playing 60 games in 63 days right now. I don’t see, given how the reality of the health situation over the past few weeks, how we were going to get going any faster than the calendar we’re on right now no matter what the state of those negotiations were.”

Manfred also reiterated that health guidelines prevented a longer season from stretching beyond the normal MLB playoff window. Manfred said that health experts working with MLB warned that a coronavirus spike is likely to occur after September, which led MLB to throw out the possibility of playing deeper into the winter.