FanPulse: What’s needed for a meaningful 2020 season?

Without a baseball season, we still have FanPulse resuming, as we gauge your thoughts and feelings on the baseball-related talking points of our times—mainly, at this point, if, when, and how meaningful a season might be.

Can baseball be meaningful in 2020?

Baseball, unlike almost any other sport, is a seasonal game. The way the MLB is set up, the league can’t play games at all times of the year like the NBA or NHL, no one knows this better than Twins fans.

So that means while the league offices try to figure out when games can start, they also have to figure out how late into the year they can go. After figuring out those details, the league will need to take a hard look at how many games can actually be played and determine if all the trouble is worth it for one season.

Baseball fans appear to be willing to cut a huge chunk out of the notoriously long season and still treat it as normal. 40 percent of national baseball fans think it would only require 80 games or more to qualify as a “meaningful” season. Another 40 percent would bump that number up to 100 games, according to SB Nation’s FanPulse survey.

This aligns with more than 50 percent of fans who believe that there will be 90 or fewer games this year.

The breakdown of Minnesota Twins fans within the larger group almost perfectly matches up with the national results.

What does baseball look like with a shorter season?

If the 2020 year is cut nearly in half, some major changes are going to need to be made. Whenever it is deemed safe to play baseball again, roughly two-thirds of fans agree that there still needs to be some sort of spring training.

However, almost 75 percent of fans would be willing to forgo this year’s All-Star Game.

Fans are still confident that there will be a season in 2020, with the majority believing it will start sometime in June. With the Twins expected to make a push for postseason play this year, that could mean figuring out how to play a Twins home game sometime in mid-November, a topic which will be further discussed in next week’s FanPulse survey.

Regardless of how late this year’s season goes, fans made it clear that they don’t want any of the 2020 struggles to bleed into 2021. When asked if next season should be delayed to give a longer and more full off season to players, fans resoundingly said no.

For now, there are more questions in baseball than there are 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 Twins-specific questions.