Authors: Tim Wegener (timothywegener2023@u.northwestern.edu), Weinberg ’23 Rishab Jayanthi (rishabjayanthi2023@u.northwestern.edu), Weinberg ’23

The COVID-19 crisis has upended economies, lives, and cultures around the world. Among the endless list of COVID-19 affected markets lies sports. For months, sports were put on hold while the government and healthcare industry tried to ‘flatten the curve.’ Spring training was cancelled, seasons were paused and then restarted, and players opt-ed out. However, every sport was affected differently. MLB completely cancelled spring training and cut its season by over 100 games. Football cancelled its preseason, but its regular season has continued as planned, for the most part (sans fans). 

In one of the most significant disruptions for sports, COVID-19 forced MLB to halt spring training, then have an abbreviated summer camp. There were many questions about how this change would affect the game. Would the layoff benefit pitchers or hitters? Would players be able to see the ball as well? Would players be injured more often? Here we are, at the end of 2020, and we now have the ability to answer these questions.

Teams have scored more often over the last few years, as players have hit more home runs. However, runs per game actually decreased by .18 this year, compared to 2019. This is not certain proof that hitters were worse this year, but it is certainly significant after years of an upward trend. More surprising were the batting averages and hits allowed in 2020. The league batting average was down 7 points from 2019, at .245. This is the lowest season batting average since 1972. Hits/hits allowed, which measures the number of hits allowed by pitchers, was at its lowest since 1968. Perennial batting champion challengers, like Christian Yelich and José Altuve, barely hit .200 over the entire season.

Despite pitchers and catchers usually reporting to spring training a week or two before the position players, it seems as though spring training might actually be more beneficial for those hitters. Without baseball’s typical preseason, it seems like hitters were never able to get hot, especially some of baseball’s biggest names. Maybe players weren’t able to see the ball as well, or maybe they never had time to tweak their swing so that it was just right. For whatever reason, hitting was historically difficult in 2020.

However, perhaps the altered season did not affect baseball in all of the ways some had feared. Fans and analysts wondered aloud in early 2020 about if cancelling spring training would put players’ health at risk. Without normal spring training, players would have little or no time to get their bodies ready to play baseball nearly daily, for months on end. MLB players spent 13,313 games on the injured list this year, and excluding COVID-19 related stints, they spent 11,608 games on the IL in total. In other years, more time was obviously spent on the IL because the seasons were longer. In 2019, players missed 45,520 games on IL. In 2018, the number was 34,126, and in 2017, it was 31,300. Finally, in 2016, 31,050 games were missed.

In 2020, 1,796 games were played, meaning 6.46 players were missing from any given game for injury reasons. However, in 2019, that number was a whopping 9.37, the highest it has been in years. In 2018, it was 7.01, 6.44 in 2017, and 6.39 in 2016. Baseball players certainly seem to be getting injured more in recent years, but this phenomenon is not limited to the 2020 season, where there was no spring training. In fact, in 2020, players may have been even less injury prone compared to in previous years, as rosters expanded to 28 players, increasing the number of players who could potentially be sent to the IL. 

Although COVID-19 certainly changed how baseball was played this year, perhaps some of our fears were not realized.

Baseball was not the only sport affected by the need to adapt around the global pandemic. The NFL had to forego its usual preseason during the summer of 2020, leaving many fans to wonder whether or not players would be adequately prepared for the coming regular season having been out of practice for so long. 

While injuries in football are, of course, commonplace, soft-tissue injuries, such as ACL tears and high ankle sprains, have occurred with alarming frequency in 2020. Football players usually use the preseason to build elasticity in these structures to support the explosive, sudden movements required of them to do their job. However, without this opportunity, some of the biggest names in football, such as Carolina’s Christian McCaffrey, have been out for nearly the entire season. Saquon Barkley, Jimmy Garoppolo, Nick Bosa, and Courtland Sutton are among other big names put out of commission for weeks by the Week 2 bloodbath.

Between 1997 and 2002, there were only 31 Achilles ruptures, 35% of which occurred during the preseason. The 2009 to 2016 seasons yielded a count of 101 in an 8 year period, an average of around 12.6 per year. As of November 1st, halfway through the regular season, 15 players had suffered Achilles-related injuries in 2020 alone, far outpacing any previous season. This does not even consider the other injuries sustained such as high-ankle sprains and shoulder injuries. It is quite apparent that the lack of preseason has resulted in an increase of this specific type of injury.

Despite spring training running considerably longer than the football preseason, perhaps offseason training is even more significant for football players. In baseball, the need to build elasticity in the muscles during the preseason may be less important, as explosive movements and high impact collisions are much less frequent, at least compared to in football. Either way, the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent cancelation of many of the MLB’s and NFL’s activities has had a large effect on both sports.