It Will Resume as It Paused

When Wilmer Difo took the last at-bat against the Yankees on March 12th in West Palm Beach, everyone was aware it was the last baseball we'd see for a while. The news had already spread that baseball was hitting the pause button due to the risk of the rapidly spreading pandemic.

While it was easy at the time to be overly optimistic, how long a break did you foresee? Like a lot of fans and insiders, I mentally circled Memorial Day, the point in the calendar when warm weather takes hold just about everywhere in the U.S. That made sense, especially since reports in March suggested that the virus should weaken when it got warmer.

Those predictions proved overly optimistic. The break will turn out to be more like four and a half months. After both players and owners worked in concert to stall baseball's return date and sour the game's image with the general public, the opening day for the 60 game season was announced as July 24th.

Then Saturday, The New York Post reported that baseball planned to hit "go" a day earlier, with a prime time nationally broadcast showcase pitting the World Champion Nationals and the always imposing Yankees. That unleashed a wave of sweet images, especially a projected showdown of Max Scherzer and Gerrit Cole, who faced each other in the opener of the 2019 World Series -- before Cole jumped to the Yankees and the biggest free agent deal of the winter.

So it should begin as it ended -- the last matchup of spring training will be the first of the games that count.