Welcome to SB Nation FanPulse, a survey of fans across MLB. Each week, we send 30 polls to plugged in fans from each team. Yankees fans, sign up HERE to join FanPulse.
Can there be a meaningful 2020 MLB season?
Baseball is obviously a seasonal game. Unlike the NBA and NHL, there just can’t be MLB games year-round, a fact surely not lost on Yankees fans.
So while the league offices try to figure out when games can start, they also need to figure out when they will end. After coming to a conclusion on those minor details, the league will need to take a hard look at if that timespan allows for enough games to be played for a meaningful season.
Fans seem to be willing to cut a large chunk of the notoriously long season and still treat it as a qualifying MLB season. 40 percent of national baseball fans think a season of at least 80 games would be enough to clear that bar. Another 40 percent think there needs to be 100 games, according to SB Nation’s FanPulse survey.
Yankees fans specifically fall mostly into the 100+ category.
Either of those options would align with the majority of fans who think baseball will start again sometime in June.
What does baseball look like with a shorter season?
If the 2020 season is roughly cut in half, some major changes are going to be needed. Whenever it is determined that it’s safe to play baseball again, roughly two-thirds of fans say there still needs to be some version of spring training.
That same support isn’t behind the All-Star Game. Almost 75 percent of fans think baseball will skip this year’s midsummer classic.
Despite the setbacks, there is still confidence among fans that there will be a 2020 season. With the Yankees expected to once again make a postseason push, that could mean figuring out how to play a home game in New York sometime in mid-November. This topic will be further discussed in next week’s FanPulse survey.
Regardless of when this season ends, fans don’t want the 2020 struggles to bleed into 2021. When asked if next season should be delayed to give a longer and more complete offseason to players, fans resoundingly said no.
For now, there are more questions in baseball than answers. For the next few weeks, while we all wait to figure out what Rob Manfred and friends have in mind, we will be turning the questions back to fans.
Make sure to sign up for the weekly FanPulse surveys and have your voice heard, both on national and Yankee-specific questions.