“Welcome Back, Baseball!” Wednesday

We interrupt Trivia Tuesday for ... baseball.

A month from today—and nearly four months after the official 2020 season should have started—Major League Baseball will return. Spring Summer training begins on July first, with Opening Day being either the twenty-third or twenty-fourth depending on the agreement between MLB and the Players Association.

It’s going to look weird, as all the MLB parks will basically be giant dugouts without fans. There are a lot of odd rules being implemented. Everyone still hates Rob Manfred. But there will be baseball.

All the baseball sites have basically the same writeup about what’s new and different about the season, so here’s Pirates.com’s take on what to expect. Well, other than not being able to go to PNC. However, the Three Rivers Heritage Trail’s North Shore branch goes right past the Park. You can kind of see the field from it. Just putting that out there.

So what does a truncated (your vocabulary word for the day) 2020 season mean for our Bucs? Well, no more of this for a while, sadly:

DK Pittsburgh Sports

But hey, they can still raise the Jolly Roger! We concentrate on the important things around here. #RaiseIt

In all seriousness, we’re glad baseball is coming back, even under these circumstances, and of course we hope everyone is and stays safe. Tomorrow I’ll take a closer look at what 2020 might hold for the Pirates, other than the obvious “Josh Bell is gonna be DHing” stuff. In the meantime, Ethan will go into more specific stuff about Baseball in the Time of COVID-19 later today.

Baseball’s back, yinz!