As we all know, professional sports have all been put on a pause recently due to the coronavirus. Sports fans nationally are looking for any signs of positivity of when we might be able to watch sports again. Many people believe that Major League Baseball will be the first sport to resume play in the coming weeks and months.

On March 12th, MLB decided to suspend baseball operations indefinitely due to the coronavirus pandemic. Since then, there have been no national sports and no baseball in general. However, recent news tells us that there is still hope for a 2020 baseball season to occur.

Many ideas have been thrown around for how play might resume. One idea that has been proposed would be to centralize the league in one or two cities. Players, umpires, coaches, and other essential personnel would all be isolated in one or two cities in the United States where they could play baseball games. Teams and staff members would be tested regularly for the virus, and would be properly socially distanced from each other throughout the whole process. It is suggested that the season could nearly be cut in half, playing 100 games instead of the typical 162. Another way suggested to get games in would be to have teams play double headers several times a week. This means they would play two seven inning games back to back instead of the typical one nine inning game a day they would have.

Although this seems like a good proposition, there is one major flaw— no MLB player is going to want to leave their family for at least four straight months, especially during a national pandemic. Many players have even said they would be extremely hesitant to participate if this were the criteria that would be required for play to resume.

Nothing concrete has been put in place about baseball’s plan to resume. However, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported Wednesday night that Major League teams have informed their players to begin getting in shape in hopes of a return. He says that the MLB is soon planning to submit a return-to-play proposition to the players union. If this proposition is approved by the union, then baseball would officially return at some point.

Before a regular season can begin, players will need a period of at least two to three weeks to get back in playing shape. With an optimistic point of view, the earliest baseball could resume would be sometime in mid to early June with its “spring training” portion to help ramp players back up. If spring training started around this time, then the regular season could begin sometime in early July.

Fans of all sports are missing their professional teams and leagues. Luckily, Major League Baseball has given us a glimpse of hope of the sports world eventually going back to normal.