If a home run ball falls with no one to catch it, does it make a sound?
Before this season, MLB had never needed to consider home run pick-up—the crowd would catch the balls, or fight over them, or perhaps throw them back, but they’d never leave them lying in the stands. But now the stands are empty. If you see a highlight of a player going deep, odds are it will include the ball’s arrival in the deserted bleachers, where it will bounce down on its own, like a bizarrely sad game of Plinko. And so included in the many questions that baseball has had to answer for a season amid a pandemic is this: What do you do with a home run?