With all baseball activities being canceled for the foreseeable future, the New York Yankees should be preparing for one of the strangest regular seasons ever experienced. Fitting all 162 games into the year will be difficult as operations won’t begin for at least another six weeks, and likely longer due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The assumption that the season will be shortened opens up a number of alternative ideas that could supplement the loss of games — one of the ideas is doubleheaders. If MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred is forced to restructure the season, enforcing doubleheaders is a fantastic workaround to ensure teams play as many games as possible.
ESPN’s Jeff Passan mentioned the possibility of playing doubleheaders once or twice per week, but how would that work in regards to mitigating fatigue.
The average season is 27 weeks long and encompasses 162 games over that period. That’s about six games per week, and at this rate, that’s far behind the number they would need to have a competitive season.
Passan suggests a weekly doubleheader, though, which would allow the league to fit in as many games as possible while maintaining the normalcy of the regular season. However, it’s likely they could shorten the lengths of the games on those days to help avoid injury.
The Yankees have dealt with ample injuries this offseason before Spring Training even began, and forcing them to play multiple doubleheaders per week would be roster suicide. There’s little evidence to suggest that Yankees’ sluggers would be able to survive that reality.
To help lower the probability of injury, the MLB could expand the active roster to 28, which would increase the rotation of players and maintain rest. There are various options the league could follow, but taking a little bit of everything could be the solution.
If it were up to me, I would institute one doubleheader per week but expand the active roster to mitigate injuries. Lowering the number of games to about 140 might normalize the schedule and allow the playoffs to occur without detrimental weather conditions.