This paper presents a theoretical study of a model predictive control (MPC) strategy employed in semi-active control system with magnetorheological (MR) dampers to reduce the responses of seismically excited structures. The MPC scheme is based on a prediction model of the system response to obtain the control actions by minimizing an objective function, which can compensate for the effect of time delay that occurred in real application. As an example, a 5-story building frame equipped with two 20 kN MR dampers is presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed MPC scheme for addressing time delay and reducing the structural responses under different earthquakes, in which the predictive length l = 5 and the delayed time step d = 10, 20, 40, 60, 100 are considered. Comparison with passive-off, passive-on, and linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control strategy indicates that MPC scheme exhibits good control performance similar to the LQG control strategy, both have better control effectiveness than two passive control methods for most cases, and the MPC scheme used in semi-active control system show more effectiveness and robustness for addressing time delay and protecting structures during earthquakes.