Here at the dawn of short attention span baseball, the season reduced from a soliloquy to a hiccup, one must recalibrate one's outlook.
Take, for instance, the old sports bromide _ "It's not how you start, it's how you finish." Now shred that. In a 60-game, virus-shortened baseball season, the comforting idea that somehow time is on your side is passe.
Now, it's very much how you start ... or you may be finished.
In the increased gravity of a 60-game schedule, as opposed to the 162-game one that was instituted nearly 60 years ago, each game bears more than twice the usual weight (2.7 times the weight to be precise). Consider that the Nationals played 17 postseason games last year, which would comprise close to 30% of this regular season.
So, yes, we'll be working very much under playoff-like urgencies. And come July 24 in Flushing, if it turns out that the Mets' Jacob deGrom is fit enough (he felt some back tightness Wednesday) to face the Braves' Mike Soroka, the opener will have an uncommon edge to it.
In such a compressed docket, there is no time built in to wait out a slump, to nurse an injury or to bring along gradually a tender young talent. Losing streaks just got a whole lot more worrisome.
As the Braves get ready to break from the starting gate, they, like every other team in this compromised season, must avoid faltering at the break.
Just as some people are not morning people, some baseball players naturally start slow. Take Braves new catcher Travis d'Arnaud, who over six-plus seasons has hit .205 for the months of April and May and .257 the rest of the way. His two lowest monthly OPS numbers show themselves in the first two full months of the season.
Two very important players _ first baseman Freddie Freeman and closer Will Smith _ are great looming question marks at the start not because of their tendencies but because of the scary new variable of COVID-19. Both tested positive and missed the team's summer camp. When well, Freeman is a model of consistency whose first-half-of-the-season OPS (.899) is just a slight bit better than his second half (.863). But who knows how anyone will react when coming back from this confounding virus?
Just days away from a season unlike any other _ one with no guarantee of completion _ here's how two specific Braves players are approaching the start. They come at this from opposite perspectives, one who began last season in the best way imaginable, the other with a record of taking a while to warm up, like green wood on a campfire.
