Reese Kaplan -- Pandemic Making Us Look Forward to 2021

You have seen all of the regular platitudes about the 2020 baseball season.  When will it start? Where should it be played? How will the post-season be handled?  What about the minor league seasons? The one question not addressed nearly as much is what does the potential missing 2020 season do to the 2021 season yet to come?

Think about it.  There are a great many questions to be answered.  For example, do the players get “charged” for a year of service even when no games are played?  One would think that if they receive a salary then they will indeed get credited with service time.  That’s an important distinction because it means players who were on their final pre-free-agency season in 2020 now have the opportunity to achieve that sell-yourself-to-the-highest-bidder free-for-all without having logged a single inning of 2020 baseball.  

For the Mets that means players like Marcus Stroman or Yoenis Cespedes who may or may not have played themselves into a highly profitable 2021 free agent bidding session may instead be out to the auction block without having ever thrown a final season pitch or swung a final season bat for the New York Mets.  Will that increase or decrease their inevitable asking price? I’m thinking the prices will be depressed for the 2020/2021 free agency period since there was no revenue coming in to fund big roster additions.  

Of course, Major League Baseball might invent a new approach to this scenario in which players are indeed obligated to play again in 2021 under the terms of 2020 before free agency arrives.  That makes some sense for the players like Stroman but what does it do for folks like Noah Syndergaard who was set to be a free agent after the 2021 season? Does it mean he would have to wait until 2022 and the whole 2020 season was just non existent on players’ service time?

Another matter is the aging ballplayers like Robinson Cano.  He had a poor first year in New York and the hope was that 2020 would provide him with a rebound, much like Carlos Beltran did in his second year with the Mets.  However, will that 2021 season be the rebound year or will his increasing age begin to whittle down his performance numbers overall?

Another big question is what happens to the minor leaguers?  It would seem that an elimination of the 2020 season would indeed inhibit their growth having missed a crucial year of development.  That curtails advancement up the chain to the majors and keeps them living hand-to-mouth for yet another full season.  

I would think many more teams will be looking to the development from within going forward than external free agent resources who would be quite costly.  As a result, there may be more classic baseball than the more modern change-your-uniform-annually style to which many of us have become accustomed.  

Obviously all of us would like to see some kind of 2020 baseball, both for the entertainment value and to give us something to do and discuss other than the impact of the pandemic.  However, there’s no guarantee it will happen or even matter all that much if the season must wait until the All Star break or later finally to begin.