Commissioner Rob Manfred: MLB wasn't going to play more than 60 games

Negotiations between the MLB and its players were extremely tense and one of the most highly contested issues was the number of games that would be played in a shortened season. But in an interview with Dan Patrick, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred revealed that there was no real plan for more than 60 games to be played.

"The reality is we weren’t going to play more than 60 games no matter how the negotiations with the players went, or any other factor," Manfred told Patrick. "I think this is the one thing we come back to every single day: we’re trying to manage something that has proven to be unpredictable and unmanageable. I know it hasn’t looked particularly pretty in spots, but having said that, if we can pull off this 60-game season, I think it was the best we were going to do for our fans given the course of the virus. It’s the calendar. We’re playing 60 games in 63 days right now. I don’t see, given the reality of the health situation over the past few weeks, how we were going to get going any faster than the calendar we’re on right now. No matter what the state of those negotiations were."

The MLB season is slated to begin on July 23 but initially, there were talks of the season resuming as early as this weekend as a part of an 82-game schedule. However, it now seems like that was a plan that was never taken too seriously by the league.