Report: MLB hopes to have season plan in place by end of May

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Plans for an eventual 2020 Major League Baseball season continue to evolve, and there appears to be a timeline for settling on a course of action.

Commissioner Rob Manfred has remained confident there will be a season this year, and the league views the end of May as a logical soft deadline to have a plan in place to make it happen, sources told Jeff Passan of ESPN.

This timeline, according to Passan's sources, would see MLB players report for three weeks of preparation before the campaign starts in July. Each team would play between 80 and 100 games during a regular season stretching through October before neutral, warm-weather sites host postseason contests in November.

The season will not necessarily be lost if a template has not been finalized by the end of May, Passan notes.

Manfred had previously expressed hope that the season could get underway by mid-May, but that now appears unlikely.

"While I fully anticipate that baseball will resume this season, it is very difficult to predict with any accuracy the timeline for the resumption of our season," Manfred wrote in a letter to league employees last week.

Various ideas have been presented as to where and how the season will eventually take place. Those propositions include staging the entire campaign in Arizona or across multiple select states with players living in quarantine. None of the proposed plans are concrete as the league and the MLB Players Association continue to discuss the logistics of a return to action amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Additionally, Passan theorizes the minor-league season could be canceled altogether if MLB expands major-league rosters to help prevent injuries.