Yesterday, Major League Baseball’s 2020 Operations Manual became available. It’s the document that outlines health and safety protocols for the 2020 season that both MLB and the MLBPA have agreed to. The manual is over 100 pages long and (I thought) fairly interesting reading. (You can find my Twitter summary here.) While the document was too long to review in detail, I’d like to highlight some takeaways and raise questions about the viability of baseball during a pandemic.
The plan is built around having three “tiers” of personnel. There are also caps on the number of personnel allowed to be categorized in a particular tier.