Baseball is back, but is 60 games enough to determine the best team?

Everybody’s excited to have baseball back, I suppose.

But let’s not kid ourselves: The national pastime’s 60-game schedule will be nothing more than an exhibition season, one that comes nowhere close to determining the best team in baseball by the time this year comes to a close.

Baseball after all is distinguished by its lengthy season, a seven-month trek that leads to a true champion by year’s end.

This season will be anything but.

“That’s the beauty of baseball,” Whitey Herzog likes to say. “You play so much you learn who you truly are.”

We’ll have no real way of knowing that in 2020.

We’re so glad to get baseball back, many of us have forgotten the game has been characterized a marathon, not a sprint. It’s an everyday slog through the bright promise of spring, the dog days of summer, and the long shadows of autumn.

Instead, this year, we’ll get a regular season that – barring more health scares for players or other team staff – is only a few weeks longer than a conventional spring training.

As those weeks unfold, we shouldn’t forget that baseball takes more than a half year to decide its best teams, not a fraction of that.

Case in point: After the 2019 St. Louis Cardinals played their 60th game on June 6, they sat at 31-29, 2 ½ games back in third place in the National League Central, in fourth place in the wild-card standings and four games out of a playoff spot if the season had ended at that point.

We remember – gosh, it seems a lifetime ago – how the season sorted itself out after 162 games: The 91-71 Cardinals won the NL Central title and found their way to an eventual berth in the National League Championship Series.

The team that beat the Redbirds in the NLCS – the about-to-be World Series champion Washington Nationals (93-69) – were in fourth place in the NL East in early June, 6 ½ game games out of first place in their division, seven games out of a wild card spot, six games under .500, at 27-33 – a record that was better than only two teams in the 15-team league.

A 60-game season doesn’t allow time for the cream to rise to the top, or the dross to slide to the bottom. It doesn’t allow players the time to work through a slump that could last weeks, or for players on an uncharacteristic tear to revert to the mean. It doesn’t allow clubs, for good or bad, to find their true level of play and performance.

Which is to say: Baseball will crown a champion after 60 games this year, but it almost certainly won’t be the champion that a 162-game season would have produced.

Compounding the issue, the National League pennant will go to a team that doesn’t even play all the teams in its league during the course of the so-called season. The Cardinals are scheduled to play 10 games apiece against the other four teams in the NL Central and 20 games total against teams in the American League Central.

They have no games scheduled against NL East or NL West clubs.

Let’s put some specifics to that concept: The Cardinals will play games against the Detroit Tigers and Chicago White Sox, but no games against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Atlanta Braves, San Francisco Giants, Nationals or six other teams in the East and West.

If that’s any way to crown a league champion, I’ll eat your hat. Pass the salt while you’re at it.

I suppose we’re lucky we’re getting any baseball at all, the end result of a clumsy compromise following an ugly owners-players fight that focused too much on dollars and not enough on public or player safety.

With all that billionaire-millionaire acrimony and the real pandemic challenges that still face us, I suppose Commissioner Rob Manfred decided any season might be considered better than none.

That said, this shallow, truncated, blink-of-the-eye-and-you’ve-missed-it baseball season will fall far short of what we expect – indeed, what we need – from our national pastime.

Granted, it will be nice to see the games on TV, or to tune in on the car radio when we’re running an errand on Sunday afternoon.

We’ve all missed the little moments that make a baseball season: Savoring that stirring ninth-inning rally to win a game, marveling at a spectacular fielding play or unparalleled time at bat, arguing a Mike Shildt decision that has half of us supporting him, the other half screaming at him.

We’ve all missed the play-by-play calls from Shannon and Rooney, McLaughlin and Horton, the voices of summer getting us through another game and another page on the calendar.

This year, sadly, those pages will turn too quickly. At the end, we’ll be left with a champion, one hardly worthy of the name.

Or worthy, mind you, of the importance we’ll attach to it.