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Baseball is back, maybe: 5 things to look forward to in 2020

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Remember baseball? You know, America's pastime? The glue of every father-son relationship for the last century? It's back. (Well, maybe. Provided the still-raging coronavirus pandemic doesn't kibosh the whole thing.)

On Tuesday night, following an extended, embarrassing labor dispute between Major League Baseball and the MLBPA, a return-to-play plan was finalized, setting the stage for a 2020 campaign unlike any other in modern baseball history. Players will report to spring training 2.0 next week, and a 60-game regular season will get underway either July 23 or 24, with teams (mostly) playing in their home ballparks without fans in attendance.

Before COVID-19 upends this entire venture, then, let's identify five things to look forward to in this unprecedented 2020 season.

Weirdness

Under normal circumstances, the Baltimore Orioles - coming off a second straight season of more than 100 losses and still mired in the let's-not-even-pretend-we're-trying stage of their rebuild - would've had no shot of making the postseason in 2020. A 162-game sample doesn't allow for too much randomness; it's exceedingly rare for demonstrably awful teams to sneak into the postseason, much like it is for demonstrably great teams finish last in their division. Now, however, with the season trimmed to 60 games, all bets are off. "2020 will go down as the season in baseball history when the relative talent of the teams was the least important in determining the playoff field and the eventual champion," as FanGraphs' Dan Szymborski more eloquently put it.

The Orioles, and every other supposed non-contender, will at least have a chance. Remember, last year's World Series champions were 27-33 after 60 games, stuck in fourth place in their division, while the Pittsburgh Pirates, who finished last in the National League Central with a 69-93 record, were only two games below .500. This is going to be a weird season, one in which every plot twist - an injury that sidelines a star player for a week, for instance, or an unexpectedly torrid stretch from a scrub - will have an outsized impact. And it's going to be a hell of a lot of fun.

Let the kids play

Under normal circumstances (that clause is getting a workout today), the San Diego Padres likely wouldn't have included left-hander Mackenzie Gore - the game's consensus top pitching prospect - on their Opening Day roster. With their playoff prospects looking dicey once again in 2020, the Padres probably would've taken a more prudent approach, sending Gore back to the minors - and deferring the start of his major-league service time clock - until they had a clearer sense of their playoff prospects. Again, it's a different ballgame now.

The Los Angeles Dodgers aren't assured an eighth straight National League West title anymore. Nobody is assured anything in a 60-game season. As such, a host of teams - particularly fringe playoff contenders like the Padres - may well toss aside their development plans for their top prospects (especially with a minor-league season unlikely to happen) and bring them up to the big leagues earlier than expected for this mad dash of a season, potentially resulting in a crazy influx of young talent. Do the Toronto Blue Jays, who signed Hyun-Jin Ryu this offseason in an effort to wrap up their rebuild, put top prospect Nate Pearson in their big-league rotation instead of letting him stagnate this summer? Do the Seattle Mariners, a putative afterthought in the American League West, make Jarred Kelenic their everyday center fielder? Hell, do the Detroit Tigers, the worst team in the majors last year, start Casey Mize on Opening Day for his big-league debut? Each of these scenarios is plausible, at least.

Universal DH

As a group, pitchers hit .128/.160/.162 in 2019. They're all terrible at hitting. Even the good ones are objectively terrible hitters. Madison Bumgarner hit .127/.236/.222 last year, good for an OPS that was 175 points lower than that of the worst qualified hitter. We won't have to suffer through those noncompetitive plate appearances this summer, however, as the 2020 season will be the first with a universal designated hitter. It's a welcome change, not only because watching good hitters hit is far more entertaining than watching bad hitters hit, but because it eliminates the risk of injury that results from asking pitchers to do things they're not really trained to and because, well, National League baseball isn't the bastion of strategy its proponents make it out to be. These days, amid deepening bullpens, the tactical decision at the heart of anti-DH rhetoric - when a manager should remove his starting pitcher - is rarely an agonizing one, as Eno Sarris of The Athletic recently observed.

Now, instead of watching managers make largely rote decisions, we'll get to watch pitchers pitch until their effectiveness wanes, and we'll get to watch actual hitters hit in their stead. And before long, erstwhile NL enthusiasts will be singing the praises of the DH. You'll see.

New extra-inning rule

No change will be more polarizing than the new extra-inning rule, wherein every inning after the ninth starts with a runner on second base - a rule, by the way, that minor-league baseball adopted two seasons ago. And while it was undoubtedly implemented out of necessity - avoiding marathon games is paramount this season, with each club playing 60 games in the span of 66 days - it could nevertheless make extra innings more exciting and ultimately reduce the number of games in which everybody involved is just praying for a swift end. Even avowed purists don't really want to watch their club's sixth reliever go through the opposing teams' 7-8-9 hitters in the top of the 13th; at that point, it's hard to resist switching to Netflix or just turning off the TV and going to bed. By placing a runner on second to start the frame, though, every at-bat in extras is a high-leverage one, making for guaranteed intensity no matter who's up, and with a runner in scoring position at all times, the likelihood of a game stretching past the point of interest is considerably lower.

It's baseball

At the end of the day, even if you hate the rule changes or feel that a 60-game season is for some reason illegitimate, we still (hopefully) get two months of baseball this summer, and that's something to look forward to in and of itself. Baseball is indeed an inextricable part of the American social fabric, but it's not an inalienable right, and it should not be taken for granted that we get to watch Mike Trout hit baseballs to the moon in the midst of a pandemic that has already resulted in more than 123,000 fatalities in the United States. This season could've very easily not happened. Frankly, it's debatable as to whether or not it should happen. So just enjoy it.

Jonah Birenbaum is theScore's senior MLB writer. He steams a good ham. You can find him on Twitter @birenball.

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