Credit: Fox News

The season may need to be cut short in the interest of public health.

Typically, the Major League Baseball season starts around April, and then runs six months to either the end of September or the beginning of October. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, the season still hasn’t nailed down a concrete start date. A potential start has been floating somewhere between mid-June and the Fourth of July, but nothing has been nailed down as of yet. Theoretically, if the season were to start late, it would just run a little later for the requisite six months. According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, though, that might not be a good idea.

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said Major League Baseball told the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday that whether the season starts late or not, the league should endeavor to bring things to a close by the end of October.

“If the question is time, I would try to keep it in the core summer months and end it not with the way we play the World Series, until the end of October when it’s cold,” Fauci said.

The heat of the summer has been proven to reduce the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, if only slightly. However, if things were to progress into the fall and winter months, it could become more hazardous for players, fans, and staff.

Credit: CBS Sports

“This virus is one that keeps fooling us. Under most circumstances — but we don’t know for sure here — viruses do better when the weather starts to get colder and people start spending more time inside, as opposed to outside,” Fauci said. “The community has a greater chance of getting infected.”

Of course, considering the ongoing labor dispute between MLB players and owners, season length might not be a problem. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred warned earlier in the week that with both the dispute and the pandemic, there is a very real chance that league may simply skip 2020 entirely. While this would certainly be ideal from a health perspective, Fauci confessed that he misses watching his home team, the Washington Nationals, play.