Major League Baseball has been paused since mid-March due to the coronavirus pandemic, and while nothing is official yet, it sounds like the league is making progress towards a 2020 season.
According to Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, MLB will present plans to team owners on a Monday conference call, and if the owners give approval, will present the proposals to the players on Tuesday.
SNY's Andy Martino reported last week that MLB and the players could come to an agreement before the end of May regarding what the plan to restart looks like, and Joel Sherman of the New York Post recently reported that an MLB proposal to the players would be coming soon.
Per The Athletic's recent report, MLB will propose a regular season of around 80 games, with both 78 and 82 games among the options, beginning in July.
Also of note, teams would play in their home stadiums -- including the New York teams -- but they would only play against teams in their division and teams in the same geographical division of the opposite league. In simpler terms, the Mets would only play against teams in the NL East and AL East.
The Athletic report notes that teams unable to open in their cities temporarily would relocate, either to their spring-training sites or major league parks in other parts of the country.
There would also be an expanded playoff system, per The Athletic. The team with the best record in each league would receive a bye in the Wild Card round and advance to the Division Series. The two other division winners and wild card with the best record would face the bottom three wild cards in a best-of-three wild-card round.
Of course, this plan, even if accepted by the union, is subject to change given the way the coronavirus pandemic evolves over the coming weeks.
There's also still the issue of players' pay, as the union would need to agree to a further reduction of player salaries based on expected revenue decreases.
But it would be one step closer to pro baseball in 2020.