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To tell the story of the 2021 college baseball season—a season that will be unlike any other in the sport’s history, one that will come with coronavirus testing and protocols designed to limit its spread, but also more talent than ever before—we have to start at the end of the 2020 season.
Last season was the first in decades to not end with a dogpile and fireworks in Omaha. Instead, it was aborted a month after Opening Day, just as the coronavirus began spreading in America. That incompleteness reverberates through the sport today and will for years to come. To explain this year, we must first understand what happened last year.
The season began like any other with the fanfare of Opening Day on Feb. 14—Valentine’s Day. Just four weeks later, it was over.
On the morning of March 12, the college sports world was just beginning to feel the seismic effects of the nascent pandemic. Within 24 hours, it had seen the Ivy League become the first conference to cancel athletics and the NBA go on pause following the positive test by Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert. Still, no one expected what the day would bring.
Conference after conference followed the Ivy League and NBA’s lead, placing their own seasons on pause. Then, at 4:14 p.m., the NCAA released a statement that it was canceling all its winter and spring championships—including the College World Series—due to the spread of the coronavirus. The season was over.
Stunning, unprecedented scenes played out across the country. Team buses turned around midway through their drives to weekend series. Teams that were in the air that afternoon landed to news that they needed to get back on the plane and come home. Assistant coaches who were out on recruiting trips were pulled off the road and told to turn around. Everywhere there were confused, devastated team meetings full of unanswerable questions and uncertain futures.
In Oxford, Ohio, for a few hours, however, everything continued as normal. As college sports came to a screeching halt around them, Miami (Ohio) and Penn State
