One thing you can say for sure about the 2020 MLB season is that it is happening. Barring the kind of calamity that seems to wait around every corner this year, we're going to get to the playoffs. There seems to be a sound plan to get through that too. And if MLB can pull that off, we'll have a World Series and a champion.
If we get that far, it will qualify this season as a kind of triumph. We'll be sorting out the context of this campaign for years, but it will exist in the record books. Baseball's uninterrupted stretch of conducting some sort of major league campaign will still stretch back to the 1870s. Stuff has happened and some of it has been pretty good. Some has not.
As the first months of the pandemic dragged on, with the sports world in limbo, the wait for the baseball season was interminable. It often seemed like it wouldn't happen. It often seemed like it shouldn't happen, especially given the ill will generated by the negotiations between the league and the players for the parameters of the season. Then, suddenly, it began and the games piled up and it went by very fast. Just like that, summer is in its waning days and we're less than two weeks from the largest October bracket in history.
The season went by so quickly and has been so infused with omnipresent pandemic anxiety, that it might be easy to overlook just what this season has had to offer. And it has given us plenty, though some of its "gifts" weren't exactly on our holiday wish list. Maybe that should not qualify as a surprise. After all, the 2020 season is truly unlike any that's come before. When that happens, there have to be lessons we can learn, right?