Summarizing an earlier post of mine: in the spring / early-summer when plans were coming together, analysts predicted a summer reprieve from the virus, followed by a fall spike.
With this in mind, and the players’ desire to be with families, MLB kept home cities and freedom to live at home vs isolation (thinking an ease in transmission this summer would permit more travel and leniency), but condensed the season to finish in August so playoffs wouldn’t stretch into fall.
Now we know they needed to prioritize isolation vs timing, because we didn’t get a summer reprieve.
Baseball got it wrong .