On opening day, baseball's return is nothing short of a miracle

The first pitch of the 2020 Major League Baseball regular season left the right hand of Washington Nationals ace Max Scherzer at 7:08 p.m. and thudded into catcher Kurt Suzuki's mitt, and it was nothing short of a miracle.

It was a miracle that there was baseball at all Thursday night at Nationals Park, or on any night, anywhere in the United States. It was a miracle the New York Yankees were in the visiting dugout, a miracle the Nationals could gather to watch their 2019 championship flag raised, a miracle there could be a ceremonial first pitch, thrown by an epidemiologist.

In a century and a half of baseball history, there had never been a game like the one played Thursday night. Baseball had never looked like this - socially distanced and devoid of fans - and it had never sounded like this, with canned crowd noise piped in over the loudspeakers.

There were so many layers of story lines to peel back before there could be baseball Thursday night - each one worthy of its own epic retelling - the 2020 Nationals at times seemed like bit players in their own performance.

There was the raising of the Nationals' 2019 World Series championship flag high above the scoreboard in right-center field, a pregame ceremony highlighting the Black Lives Matter movement and the fight for social justice, and a ceremonial first pitch from famed epidemiologist Anthony Fauci - low and outside.

Sports are the nation's great escape from the pressures and realities of everyday life. But there was no escape provided here. Players from both teams lined up alongside their respective baselines, spaced apart in a show of social distancing. During a moment of silence, all uniformed personnel on both teams dropped to one knee, then everyone rose again for the recorded playing of the national anthem.

Small throngs of fans dotted the rooftops of the distant apartment buildings and hotels beyond the fences. But otherwise, there was no one watching who wasn't a media member or someone affiliated with either team.

Everybody did their level-best to pretend - or to manufacture excitement and adrenaline where none was coming naturally. Public address announcer Jerome Hruska drew out the names of each Nationals player during pregame introductions - "HowiEEEEEEEEE Kendrick!" - but in the pauses, where there would be roars from the crowd, there was only fanfare music and the faint hum of canned cheering.

By the time the baseball found its way to Scherzer, the 2020 MLB season had already nearly died once or twice. It had been delayed by a global pandemic, compressed to a 60-game mini-season and threatened by labor unrest and economics.

And so, the longest offseason in baseball history - 266 days after Game 7 of the 2019 World Series - gave way to the latest opening day in baseball history, which itself launched the shortest regular season in modern baseball history.

This entire season is a miracle of human ingenuity, and reminders of the fragility of this endeavor were everywhere.

Baseball has seen a dozen or so players opt out of playing, and at least 80 others test positive since players began arriving at training camps in late June. The Toronto Blue Jays are still trying to figure out where to play home games, after the Canadian government effectively booted them. The American Sun Belt, including states that are home to more than a third of all MLB teams, is seeing surging caseloads of the coronavirus.

Just a few hours before Thursday night's first pitch, the Nationals announced star left fielder Juan Soto had tested positive and was taken off their active roster.

What took place Thursday night was baseball as a science experiment, taking place in a sensory-deprivation tank.

Though the grass was a brilliant green and the air a sticky summer blanket, the building itself, devoid of fans, concessions and energy, had the feeling of January, when everything is quiet and the regular season is still a rumor off in the distance.

Towering stacks of plastic-sealed cardboard boxes lined the lower concourse in the bowels of the stadium - the 2020 stadium giveaways for a different sort of season. "Davey Martinez 2020 Bobblehead," read one stack. Perhaps the Nationals' manager at some point can tear into a box to snag one as a keepsake. Entire sections of the lower bowl were covered with giant advertising tarps.

Thursday night was not only the first baseball game of 2020, it was the first regular season game for one of North America's four major sports leagues, with MLB essentially serving as a bellwether for the National Basketball Association and National Hockey League, which begin in the coming days, and the National Football League, scheduled to begin in September.

It will be a miracle if it all comes off as planned, given all we are dealing with and all that can still go wrong. But as Thursday night at Nationals Park proved, miracles do happen.