Baseball returned to Petco Park on Friday, with wrinkles and weirdness and the reassurance of lives inching closer to some sporting normalcy.
When the Padres lined up to play the Diamondbacks for a season opener stalled 120 days by a global health pandemic, the moment offered a time machine ride back to sandlot snapshots from everyone’s youth — when the sound off the bat was crisper and conversations rang clear.
If you closed your eyes to momentarily erase the $450 million-or-so stadium, it mimicked baseball in its purest form than any time in our adult lives — before the big contracts, the Jumbotrons and the tsunami of sabermetrics.