There will be baseball. 

Opening day 2020 is coming. Four months later that originally scheduled. But it’s coming. 

One-hundred-two games fewer than originally scheduled. But it’s coming.

Spring training will begin, again, on July 1. The season will begin July 23 or 24. Schedules are being made now.

The Rangers will play only teams in the West. They will play forty total games, ten each, against their A.L. West division rivals of Houston, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Then, they will play twenty total games, four each, against the N.L. West teams of Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego, Arizona, San Francisco, Colorado.

The playoffs will be the same format as always.

There will be a D.H. in the National League. With the hurry-it-up spring training, they don’t want to put an extra burden on pitchers by making them hit. 

Also, to compensate for the shorter spring training, each team will carry a thirty-man roster for the first two weeks. It will drop to twenty-eight for the next two weeks, then twenty-six for the remainder of the season. Each team will have a sixty-player taxi squad, the players on their forty-man roster plus twenty extras players who will train with the team.

And, to prove that both sides really don’t care about the game, they are instituting the extra-inning rule. If a game is tied after nine innings, every team starts the remaining extra innings with a runner at second. It’s the player who made the last out the previous inning, or a pinch runner for that player. By the way, as far as statistics goes, if that runner scores, the pitcher won’t be charged with an earned run. It will be as if that runner reached on an error. Which, if you think about it, he has. An error in judgment on the part of MLB for instituting this silly rule.

There will be baseball. It will be shorter, different, and without fans in attendance. But there will be baseball.

Opening day is one month away.