Time flies quickly about certain things and it wasn't that long ago that the 2020 baseball season appeared to be a lost cause. That time it was not about bargaining over contract clauses but instead the red-alert period for the COVID pandemic which kept teams from gathering players and fans together where they might have infected one another.
In that particular season, baseball did not begin until late July (the 23rd to be precise). The schedule put together for the makeshift year was just 60 games to last between that date and a season ending on September 27th. Like the baseball talks this year, there were countless fits and starts with delays pushing the season further and further down the road.
On July 1st the league set about what was called "Summer Camp" which was the 2020 calendar equivalent of Spring Training. Whether or not three weeks of preparatory work was sufficient is anyone's guess, but they really couldn't withstand any more postponements.
As the 2020 season played out, it was a highly unusual stat-sheet kind of year. Between players who opted out voluntarily due to concern about the infection, or those folks who actually did contract it and shouldn't be in close proximity to others. Power hitters weren't doing their usual job of launching balls over the fence and players the fans had assumed were washed up like Robinson Cano came back with a flourish (which, unfortunately, turned out to be associated with another round of PED usage).
That historic year had a lot of firsts, including having the Toronto Blue Jays playing in their Buffalo-based AAA stadium to circumvent Canada's regulations prohibiting the prospect of cross-border virus spread due to that country's apparent perception of the poor job being done by the then-president of the USA in controlling it compared to the much smaller numbers they were experiencing north of the border. (That's not a political statement, just an explanation of why the Blue Jays were forced to move).
The postseason was done as a round robin tournament of the top 16 teams which eventually resulted in a World Series beginning on October 20th. The Mets were nowhere near the top of the game and didn't participate in the tournament during Luis Rojas' trial-by-fire as the emergency replacement manager for Carlos Beltran. He finished the 2020 oddball season with a dead last 26-34 record. Things didn't get much better in 2021, hence his departure from Citifield.
Many of these topics and concepts have come up again depending on how short the 2022 season turns out to be. The last time baseball experienced regular season missed games took place during 2001 due to the September 11th attacks on the USA that forced the game into a temporary shutdown.
Oddly, 2020 brought us a player with the highest slugging % in Mets' history, even higher than Pete (.583) when he smacked 53 HRs.
ReplyDeleteDom Smith, .616. Tons of doubles. Yes, it was an odd year.
Dom Smith was the first thing that came to mind as I read the article. He had such a great season in 2020 and you wonder what "could have been" if it were a full 162 game season.
ReplyDeletePaul, it is a shame Dom did not get a full season to see what he could do - he had a strong, but relatively short 2019 too. If the "real Dom" is 100 points lower than 2020's .616 %, and he was "just" a .516 slug % guy, everyone would sign up for that.
ReplyDelete2021 was just a crazy COVID year. Let's get this strike over ASAP.