Season, like rest of 2020, will not be normal

It took a lot of time, a big, ugly labor squabble that was never actually resolved, and a bunch of COVID-19 saliva tests, but baseball is finally back.

And it’s going to be one strange season.

For years, there have been cries from fans to shorten the regular season, but nobody was asking for this much truncation. Instead of the normal 162-game schedule, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred mandated — yes, that was how this season came to be — teams play 60 games over the course of 10 weeks.

So much for the longhaul beauty of the game. Every team enters the 2020 season in the home stretch, every team tied for first place in the standings with two months to play.

Oh, and there probably won’t be any fans in the stands all year.

And every team is going to use a designated hitter now, as opposed to just the American League, which has been using it exclusively for almost 50 years.

And teams will only play against teams in their geographic region. The A’s and Giants will play 10 percent of their schedules against each other. The rest of their schedule will be against teams in the American and National League West divisions.

A new rule dictates that pitchers must face at least three batters. This will reduce pitching changes and the amount of time it takes to play a game. If a game goes to extra innings, a runner will placed at second base at the start of the inning, the better to score quickly and get the players back to the safety of their homes or hotel rooms.

Welcome to the 2020 baseball season. Nothing about it is normal. But then, what is normal these days?

By the time you pick up all the nuances of this new game, it’ll be time for the

playoffs and most things will revert to the old way. A pitcher will be able to face just one batter. The 10th inning won’t start with a runner at second base.

And none of this comes with a guarantee that the season reaches its conclusion, or even the end of the 60-game regularseason schedule. One Covid-infected player could upend the entire operation.

The shortened season will affects the Bay Area teams in dramatically different ways.

Part of the fun of the 2020 baseball season is that anything could happen. But when you had

high expectations heading into a normal, 162-game season, that’s not something you want to hear.

That’s where the A’s are as this (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime season begins.

Oakland won 97 games in back-to-back seasons and was gearing up for a run to the World Series in 2020. This was the year the A’s had been waiting for. An upstart pitching staff in tandem with a prolific offense and outstanding defense made the A’s a strong contender over 162 games. In the long haul, the A’s talent would break through and bring about another postseason berth — and this time, they hoped, a deep run, instead of another one-and-done loss in the wild-card game.

But now that the season is

only 60 games, the A’s macro advantage is gone. Anything can happen in a season this short and that means a team that’s notorious for slow starts needs to jell fast. Perhaps that enviable talent is undeniable, or maybe the inevitable chaos of a campaign where each game carries nearly three times the weight of a normal year bites Oakland. The answers start coming Friday night when they play their first game, at home against the Angels.

The beauty of this season is we won’t have to wait long to see the consequences of a slow or red-hot start.

On the other side of the Bay, the Giants are ecstatic about the shortened schedule. They might be one of those unexpected

agents of chaos. Why not?

No one could have reasonably expected the Giants to do anything of serious worth in a 162game campaign; they are in the middle of top-to-bottom roster rebuild, after all. But with nothing to lose, an expanded roster (at least to start the season), and a deep playbook of analytical advantages, the Giants could tap into the spirit that made last July so interesting (there was a stretch of that month where they went 16-3) and turn what was supposed to be a lost season into one to remember.

And if that doesn’t come to pass — if the Giants’ roster full of fringe Major League players don’t find magic amid ever-changing lineups or the team’s hellacious schedule pounds San Francisco

into submission – well, then at least the season, which starts for them on Thursday with a game in Los Angeles against the Dodgers, is short.

The tried-and-true cliche/pun at the start of a regular baseball season is that “hope springs eternal.” Of course, unless you root for one of a dozen teams, that hope is often stifled by June.

So what are we to say as a season starts amid the hot summer heat? (Or in the Bay’s case, a marine layer.) What faux-poetic pun can encapsulate this strange campaign?

How about “the heat brings out the crazy?”

Here’s to hoping it’s the good, fun kind of crazy. I think we’ve all had our fill of the other kind by now.