Baseball Is Returning With a New Sense of ‘Normal’

Spring training games start on Sunday as the sport wrestles with a new definition of “normalcy.”

The MLB operations manual for this year is very similar to the one from last year—more than one hundred pages of logistical instructions that would have been unthinkable not so long ago but now simply represent the price of daily life in a pandemic. There are a few differences, however, laid out in the table of contents. The 2021 version has two sections that the 2020 one did not: “COVID-19 Vaccinations” and “Mental Health Resources.”

In other words, an acknowledgment that there is now an obvious light at the end of this precarious tunnel, and an acknowledgement that people could still very much use some additional help.

This is the dynamic that stands out as spring training games begin Sunday: Here is the most normal-looking baseball that fans have seen in a while, if you can ignore the fact that, really, it is still not too normal after all. The game is not obviously fractured in the way that it was last year. (Or, at least, it shouldn’t be, given all that we know right now.) But this spring still bears the scars of last season, and this summer will, too.

It is, on the one hand, a normal spring training with all the regular trappings—there have been headlines about how players are in the best shape of their lives, poorly shot videos of guys taking batting practice and updates on new faces in new places. Most of the players who opted out last year are back. When games begin in a few days, fans will be allowed in most stadiums, albeit under strict guidelines and at only limited capacity. It will all be normal—or, at least, normalish. It should be baseball that will generally look like the baseball that you are used to.

But some bumps are visible if you look a little closer. There are questions about how to evaluate players coming off poor seasons—was this a real sign of trouble, a product of the odd 60-game schedule, the result of not having tools like video or just collateral damage from playing through a pandemic? There are young pitchers whose workloads now require careful juggling after the unorthodox last year. There are minor leaguers in camp now who lost months of development. And, of course, there are still a hundred pages of health and safety protocols that must be followed for the time being. All of these features will linger into the season. None of them should define the year in baseball like the weirdness of pandemic-ball defined 2020—but none of them can be totally ignored, either, and they serve as a reminder of the fact that this year is a necessarily transitional one. There is no immediate path for snapping back to normal.

The 2021 operations manual does not reference the idea of “normal.” But that is the result of an edit from last season—in addition to the two new sections, a handful of smaller tweaks were made to the document, and one of these was the language in the introduction. The 2020 manual ended its introductory section with a line that felt a little like a mission statement: “We hope that resuming Baseball will, in its own small way, return a sense of normalcy and aid in recovery.” It suggested that baseball itself would be a sign of normalcy and that any baseball could be normal baseball—an admirable statement, if one slightly undermined by the fact that it was being used to preface a book-length collection of guidelines that were anything but normal.

That line was removed for 2021—maybe because people feel closer to the concept of normal now than they did eight months ago, or because there is now a realization that not all baseball is normal baseball, or because the league wanted to make edits to save on printing costs. The introduction now ends on a simple procedural note: “Additional guidance will likely be provided throughout the season.”

Which is perhaps the most fitting mission statement of all for this season. There does not need to be any promise of normalcy, because baseball is both almost back to normal and, at the same time, not there at all. But there is hope that things will continue to change, and for that, additional guidance will be provided throughout the season.