Welcome to The Opener, where every weekday morning you’ll get a fresh, topical column to start your day from one of SI.com’s MLB writers.
To watch baseball last year was to realize that the sport had lost its narrative structure. The beginning of the season split through the summer in an awkward stutter step; the middle was not there at all; the end felt rushed. Its circadian rhythm was busted. So, too, were all its usual mechanisms for developing storylines. Anything unusual in MLB could be explained away by the fact that everything was unusual in 2020.