NEW YORK, NY— That ball is hit deep into left field. Looking up, see ya later!! Do you love baseball? Do you watch the whole season from spring training to the World Series? In the 2020 season, many teams were struck with COVID-19, and that affected some of the season. Every other year, the amount of games played throughout the season was balanced for each team, meaning each team played the same amount of games throughout the season, but in 2020 it was different. Some teams didn’t get as many total games as other teams, so the 2020 season wasn’t a fair season.
Each team started with no coronavirus and things were fine for a while, but then two weeks into the regular season, two teams, the Miami Marlins and the St. Louis Cardinals, were struck with Covid-19. That started the postponed system! The MLB (Major League Baseball) uses the postponed system when a whole team or a player has COVID-19 and the game has to be postponed. When the St. Louis Cardinals and the Miami Marlins tested positive for COVID-19, they weren’t playing against each other, but they were playing against other teams.
“This wasn’t fair,” said 10-year-old Lucas Erenburg. Lucas is proud to be a MLB fan and knows a lot about baseball.“The MLB season got really affected and the teams that didn’t get to play as many games as the other teams didn’t make it to the playoffs,” says Lucas. Luckily no one in the MLB got COVID-19 through the next 3 weeks. But the Cardinals and the Marlins didn’t get to play in that part of the season, which made their team go down in standings which wasn’t their fault. Then, many other teams, including the Dodgers, Yankees, Astros, Rays and the Cubs, got COVID-19, and their standings went down too. Those teams got great records and were the top 10 best teams in the standing. However STL (St. Louis) and MIA (Miami) did really well at the end of the season and clinched the Playoffs!
It wasn’t only the standings that ruined the season, but also the money. Teams weren’t earning money when they were quarantining during the time when a team member was sick with COVID-19.
But the great news is that in the MLB postseason of 2020, no team got sick and the postseason didn’t have any postponed games besides the Cubs vs Marlins, which was due to rain. The bad news is that on Game 7 of the World Series, the Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner got COVID-19! ESPN says that Justin Turner learned he had tested positive with COVID-19 in the 8th inning.
Overall the 2020 season was fun but in some cases, disappointing and unfair. We’ll see what happens in the 2021 season!