Three of the five teams in the National League East Division will close on points this week.
Instead of playing the Yankees four times Monday through Thursday, the Phillies leave after the Marlins’ coronavirus outbreak last weekend while playing at Citizens Bank Park.
The Marlins, after half of their 30-man roster reportedly tested positive for COVID-19, won’t play all week.
That also means the Nationals, who were slated to face the Marlins this weekend, will be leaving.
Less than a week into the season and things have already dramatically faded. If you weren’t a believer before, that MLB could get through the 60 game season …
Health is obviously the most important factor in all of this, but it’s fair to wonder what will happen to baseball’s competitive balance after its first regular season outbreak.
It will be impossible (and pointless) for the Marlins to win back all the games they lost. They will have to replace half of their roster and some or many of those replacements will be players who would not otherwise be in the big leagues in 2020. Why even have them play doubleheads? Every team that plays against the Marlins in the coming weeks will play the equivalent of a minor league team. No, the Marlins didn’t have a giant roster of players before this, but they still had mostly major league quality talent.
The Phillies, if they lose just four games, will have to bounce back on the road or finish with 56 games and have their record interpreted based on the winning percentage. What if the Phillies tied for a winning percentage with another team to position themselves in the playoffs? Does the tiebreaker go to the team that played four more games, even if circumstances beyond the control of the Phillies led them to play fewer games? MLB previously announced that there will be no tiebreaker games this year: The direct record is the first tiebreaker when applicable.
“After thinking about it, I think this could happen more than once with an organization,” Phillies manager Joe Girardi said on MLB Network Radio on Tuesday. “If everyone doesn’t play 60 games, that’s fine. We want to make the playoffs. If a team plays 57 games, you win by winning percentage to take the playoff teams.”
If the Phils end up making up the lost games this week, they’d double-headed or miss future days off, or both. Keep in mind that three of the Phillies’ six scheduled days off come in the span of a week from August 17 to 24 during their road trip to Boston, Atlanta and Washington. There is only one common day off during that week shared by the Phillies and the Yankees.
Either solution will harm the Phillies’ pitching staff. If they play doubleheads, they would need to use starting pitchers who otherwise would not have been online to get started.
But this week’s free time allows the Phillies to reset their rotation this weekend and use Aaron Nola and Zack Wheeler for four of their first five games, you might say. That’s certainly a benefit because the Phillies’ weakness is their pitching team after those two. But also consider that the week off takes the schedule off those two, and it’s not like they need a long breather after having nine months off from the regular season game. It also further delays the season debuts of Jake Arrieta and Zach Eflin, who need to remove some rust.
Free time could also affect the time of Phillies hitters. The Phillies had a terrific offensive weekend with six home runs, a .841 OPS and more walks (19) than strikeouts (18), but their situational struggles overshadowed all of that. In the first weekend, the Phils went 3-for-22 with runners in scoring position and left 26 men on base in the series’ loss to Miami. The loaded bases were stranded three times on Sunday. What will they look like this weekend after another extended stretch with no games normally only seen during the Major League Stars’ break?
One issue that has apparently already been resolved is player payout. According to Ken Rosenthal and Jayson Stark, players in the Phillies, Yankees, and Nationals will continue to make their prorated pay for the games those teams lost due to the Marlins outbreak. MLB legitimately considered circumstances beyond the control of those teams.
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