Phillies at home in Clearwater could work if COVID-19 cases slow considerably by June | Bob Brookover

Major League Baseball’s latest idea – the Grapefruit League and Cactus League playing games that count while the National League and the American League go on hiatus for a season -- has a chance. It is still greatly flawed for a variety of reasons that we will get into in a moment, but geographically it works, and it would be so different that it would surely pique the interest of an economically and psychologically depressed country in need of its sports fix.

The Phillies’ hopes for a division title might dim considerably because they would now be in the Grapefruit League North with the New York Yankees, who were the betting favorite to win the World Series before COVID-19 shut down spring training last month. The Phillies’ other division rivals would be the Toronto Blue Jays, the Detroit Tigers, and the Pittsburgh Pirates, three teams that lost a combined 302 games last season and finished a combined 111½ games out of first place.

Beat up on those teams and maybe the Phillies could earn their first wild-card playoff berth in team history.

If the season without fans staged mostly in spring-training parks in Florida and Arizona could get started by June, you are probably looking at 108 games, with teams playing each of their division rivals 12 times and three-game series home and away against the 10 teams from the other two divisions. The other Grapefruit League divisions would likely include the New York Mets, St. Louis, Miami, Houston, and Washington on Florida’s east coast, and Baltimore, Atlanta, Tampa Bay, Boston, and Minnesota in the southern end of the Gulf Coast.

According to a plan outlined by USA Today’s Bob Nightengale, the Arizona circuit would have the Chicago Cubs, San Francisco, Arizona, Colorado, and Oakland in the Northeast; the Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago White Sox, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and the L.A. Angels in the West, with Milwaukee, San Diego, Seattle, Texas and Kansas City in the Northwest. Because all the Arizona spring-training sites are in such close proximity, I would slightly alter some of those divisions to make sure you maximize the number of games between natural rivals like the White Sox and Cubs.

If this plan goes off, we will see the designated hitter in every game, which is bound to happen in the not-too-distant future anyway.

From a television standpoint, this mostly works and, to be sure, this is mostly about television and money even though it would have the added bonus of giving our country’s sports fans something to watch other than classic fights between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Full confession: I could watch Ali-Frazier over and over and over.

I’m already on record as saying that I’d prefer the baseball games wait until the fans can return because so much of the theater that enthralls us comes from the people who fill the ballparks and stadiums. Some might disagree, but the Phillies’ World Series titles in 1980 and 2008 just would not have been the same without the ballparks overflowing with win-starved crowds that had suffered through so many disappointing defeats.

The sad truth, however, is that it could be some time before fans will feel safe about returning to public places and sitting in tight quarters together. For baseball, that’s probably not going to happen until at least next season. And people do love watching their favorite baseball teams on TV. According to the Nielsen ratings, the Phillies had a 22% viewership increase last season, thanks mostly to the addition of Bryce Harper. Twelve teams, including the Phillies, were the most-watched primetime show in their markets and 19 were among the top three.

In this day and age, the games can survive even without fans in the ballpark because of the lucrative deals that have been negotiated with television networks. Roughly 30% of baseball’s revenue comes from gate receipts, according to Forbes, which released its team values earlier this week. Nearly half of the industry’s $10.7 billion in revenue comes from national and local television deals. The $3.1 billion in national TV money is split evenly among the 30 teams and there is also another $2.2 billion in local TV revenue.

The Phillies, even after sharing some of the local revenue they make from NBC Sports Philadelphia, receive more than most teams in terms of TV money.

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Plenty of problems remain with MLB’s latest proposal, starting with the fact that we still have a long way to go in terms of dealing with the COVID-19 crisis before we even think about playing any sport. The east coast of Florida still is a hot zone, with more than 10,000 combined cases in the counties of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. That number needs to significantly decline before you can think about opening spring-training sites to the number of people it takes to operate even a scaled-down version of a televised baseball game.

There also is still no good solution to the minor-league problem. Many of those teams could just disappear because they do rely on gate receipts for their existence. Also, big-league teams need triple-A teams to fill their rosters in the event of injuries. The Phillies, for example, used 56 players last season. Without an operating triple-A team, there’s no way they could use that many players.

As I wrote before, the idea of playing games in 110-degree heat in the desert for three months also has to be unappealing to the players, while teams like Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Milwaukee would all likely be playing games that would conclude very late in their East coast time zones.

Still, the second plan proposed by baseball is much better than the first, and you can’t blame the powers that be for wanting to save a season that is in jeopardy through no fault of their own.