Hi, I'm Dan Pramath and welcome to Axios Recap, presented by Facebook.

Today's Friday, June 26th. American Airlines is opening its planes to more passengers.

Microsoft is closing most of its stores, and we're wondering if baseball games will really be played this summer.

We're just a few weeks away from the return

of Major League Baseball after the players and owners on Tuesday night agreed to a 60 game season,

plus the playoffs. Or maybe I should say the theoretical return, because there is more than a

crackerjack box full of skepticism over whether this new plan is practical. Not just because of

surging COVID-19 rates, but also because the plan itself isn't fully worked out. What we know for sure,

though, is there's a huge financial incentive for everyone in baseball to get going. The game is

losing what the Chicago Cubs owner called a biblical amount of money due to lost ticket sales, lost food

sales, lost parking sales, and most importantly, lost TV money. But wanting to play is different

than actually playing. So in 15 seconds, we'll dig in with Sam Kennedy, president of the Boston

Red Sox. We're joined now by Sam Kennedy, CEO of the Boston Red Sox.

The players and the owners struck a deal earlier this week.

Why should fans or players or owners actually have confidence that there will actually be baseball

this summer?

Well, I can tell you it is a massive undertaking, and skepticism is certainly understandable.

But we are confident that the 120-odd-page protocols will put us in a place to properly test

and recognize that we will have positive cases.

We understand that if we follow the protocols to a T,

we are cautiously optimistic that we're going to be able to get through this, provide hopefully

a sense of relief and some normalcy to the country by bringing baseball back.

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