Nearly a month and a half into what was supposed to have been the start of its 2020 season, Major League Baseball is pawing at the dirt while struggling to find something, anything, to salvage the bulk of its disappearing season.

The NBA and NHL got in nearly 80% of their schedules before the impact of COVID-19 slammed the doors. The NFL still has hopes of playing most of its 2020 season.

But with nearly 20% of their schedule already gone, baseball’s owners aren’t seeing much light at the end of this tunnel and are growing increasingly anxious as more of it slips away.

We know this, in part, by the way they have tightly held onto the ticket revenue from games that were never played and some of the schemes that have been tossed around about how to bring baseball back in COVID-19-cursed times.

Remember the audacious baseball-in-a-bubble plan of a few weeks ago? The one where MLB would sequester all its teams in a few hermetically-sealed, baseball-only hotels in Arizona for four months sans families?

Anybody who has read Jim Bouton’s seminal “Ball Four” knew there were more than family, health and public relations reasons that would never fly.

Now, according to USA Today, the idea of the moment is for MLB to set up regional “hubs.” There would be three of them, each “home” to 10 teams that would be divided up on geographical lines irrespective of National or American League affiliation to limit travel.

It is one of the better ideas yet and could, in some form, eventually emerge. But there is much more work to be done.

Who knows, it could even put the Dodgers and Astros in the same pod, which would guarantee some fireworks between teams that weren’t originally scheduled to meet in the regular season.

To be sure, baseball needs some sort of a home run and soon. MLB is — or was — an annual $10.7 billion enterprise and the majority of those mega bucks are generated by TV.

Baseball would love to have fans in the stands, where ticket sales account for about 30% of their revenue. But MLB absolutely has to have TV for several reasons, which is why the scramble is on to find the format, medical clearance permitting, that gets teams back on the field the fastest.

In addition, MLB’s TV deals with ESPN and TBS are up for renegotiation next year (the Fox contract runs through 2028) and baseball needs some solid numbers to help leverage its deals.

Especially after the 2019 World Series, despite the compelling run by the Washington Nationals, was the third-least viewed in modern history.

You also have to wonder if MLB suffered a largely truncated season how many season-ticket holders would hurry back in 2021? Baseball did its fans no favors by stonewalling refunds to those who bought tickets in January, February and early March for games scheduled to be played in late March and April that were, of course, never played. MLB and its ticketing partners declared the games “postponed” instead of “cancelled” while they held onto the cash.

If not for a lawsuit brought by some fans in New York who had purchased tickets to early season Yankees and Mets games and who were being denied refunds, and resulting blowback, MLB might not have announced its acquiescence to refunds this week.

Thinking outside the box isn’t what baseball does best, but these days doing it better is a necessity.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.