If you look closely, the story of baseball in 2020 — played in a world reshaped by COVID-19 — is fraught and nuanced with stakes that serve to highlight existing power structures all the more plainly and painfully. The minutia matters perhaps more than ever before. Rethinking the entire future of the game suddenly seems possible or even necessary.
But the real story of baseball in 2020 is that a lot of people weren’t looking that closely. There was a pandemic, after all. Would-be spectators were busy, or stressed, scared and sad, and the sport they care about most didn’t offer an escape but rather a reminder of why they felt that way.