Photo credit: New York Post

The other day I spent some time speaking with the host of WFAN’s ‘JJ After Dark’, John Jastremski. I was able to get to know JJ while working together at SNY, so I reached out to him to get his perspective on what it’s been like as a broadcaster during this sports hiatus.

As I’m sure most of you are also WFAN listeners, then you know that the station is still broadcasting, but like the rest of us their hosts and production teams are doing so from home. I was curious to find out what the challenges have been like hosting a live, interactive show without the traditional studio/control room set up. His biggest struggle so far? “Just trying to stay sane in my apartment all day,” he said. As far as the broadcast goes, it has been an effective transition and he doesn’t feel hampered working away from the studio.

Now you might be thinking, “that’s great but what’s up about baseball?” Well, with the MLB and MLBPA agreeing to terms on a new deal to handle the 2020 season and beyond, we delved into the current sports landscape and his thoughts on what the coming months might look like, particularly for MLB. The biggest questions I had from the deal were: will baseball actually not resume until fans are allowed at games, and what is the impact of the service time agreement for this season? When asked, JJ’s immediate answer was a simple one, “it’s all fluid (…) So much can change from one day to the next now with all that’s going on.”

JJ spoke further about if baseball will eventually re-consider playing the season without fans, believing that the NBA will play a big factor in baseball’s decision making for this season. He cited two weeks ago, when the other leagues immediately followed the NBA’s lead in suspending their seasons as well. If the NBA season resumes and they are able to show success in holding games without fans, the MLB would then hopefully follow suit.

So with all that being said, do we even think there will be a baseball season this year?

“I think we’ll see the season start in June at the earliest and they will play without fans in attendance,” he said. (if that happens I would certainly call that a win for everyone). When asked if he thinks fans will be allowed back at games at all this year, JJ’s answer was probably the same as many of us, “who honestly even knows at this point.”

The other aspect to discuss was about service time. If the season gets cancelled, teams such as the Mets that traded for a player like Marcus Stroman who’s on a short term contract, can still lose him to free agency. The new agreement states that major league players will be able to collect their full service time this season whether games are played or not. When I commented on just how wild the implications across baseball will be because of this, JJ agreed and added “imagine if you’re the Dodgers and you give a decent haul for one-year of Mookie Betts, and now he may never play for you at all? You’d be sick over it.”

The last thing we touched on was how this will all be remembered going forward. When I asked him if this will go down as the craziest time in sports history, his reply was short, “without a doubt, absolutely.” It’s hard to argue otherwise considering this is all completely unprecedented.

To end on a positive note (if there is one right now) we spoke about what sports fans should try to look forward to while waiting for games to return. Although it feels like years away, JJ believes the fall is going to be JAM packed with sports. From the Masters, to the NFL, we could see most of our favorite sporting events of the year all scrammed into the fall time and even into the holidays (imagine a World Series game in December?)

Until the games do comeback, however, we’ll just have to call into ‘JJ After Dark’ and fire up the hot take/debate oven! Seriously though, now could be the best time ever to debate all of our wildest and most polarizing sports takes. Let’s compare eras, players, teams, whatever. Would Babe Ruth still be Babe Ruth if he played today? MJ vs Lebron vs Kobe? What better way to distract ourselves from everything going on right now than with something that gives us some sense of normalcy…debating about sports.