John Fogerty's Centerfield is as ubiquitous and celebratory a song as there is in the audio armory of sports-venue music. It was the first thing up Friday on T-Mobile Park's video screen as the Mariners tried to navigate a home-opening "ceremony" in the bizarro-world of operating big-league sports in the middle of a bigger-league global catastrophe.

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If you've watched some telecasts of games in MLB's stubby start-up season, you may have seen something you didn't expect.  High-fives. Hugs. Spitting. Close contact.

You know, like it was in the before days, when baseball players celebrated all over each other as if style points were available whenever a teammate did something more than foul a ball off his instep.

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Before the opening game of the 2020 irregular season Friday in Houston, Scott Servais sounded more like he was at the end of something instead of the beginning.

"I wasn't sure," the Mariners manager said, "we'd ever get here."

The major league baseball season, in jeopardy since mid-March not only by a pandemic but by the industry's penchant to self-destruct over money, finally lurched to its feet this week. But the degree of difficulty left Servais a little drawn.

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Much has been said about the pending weirdness of a Major League Baseball season missing 102 games and devoid of spectators, yet filled with nearly as many hygiene rules as a hospital surgery unit.

All true. But in the before days (pre-pandemic), does anyone remember 2019?

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One of the more intriguing Mariners personnel developments in 2020 is that the likely lineup for the regular-season opener Friday in Houston will include rookie Seattle draftees at three positions.

You may have known that 1B Evan White, 24, and CF Kyle Lewis, 25 last week, were high draft picks who came with high expectations. But Tim Lopes in left field?

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From a summer sports perspective, about the only sliver of virtue accruing from the coronavirus shutdown is that Seattle would be spared the onslaught of Canadian fans pouring in for the annual visit of the Toronto Blue Jays. Besides cheering for the national team, they had a secondary goal of rendering inert all those stereotypes of Canadians being polite, courteous and deferential.

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The coronavirus, always in the lead, is beginning to put distance between its relentless self and the local and national sports sensibilities.

The highlight event of the Seattle sports calendar in September, the visit of the Michigan Wolverines and coach Jim Harbaugh to Husky Stadium for a season-opening game Sept. 5 against Washington, was cancelled Thursday.

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Given what the Mariners organization wants out of its pitchers, the words of Emerson Hancock must sound like poetry.

“I didn’t like walking people,’’ he said after a recent practice at T-Mobile Park. “Growing up, playing travel ball or playing in high school, my mentality was always just go right after people, attack."

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For what it's worth, the Mariners have been told they are booked to start their 60-game schedule of a most irregular season at 6:10 p.m. PT Friday, July 24 against the defending American League champion Astros in Houston, a city whose area hospitals nearly have reached capacity with the overload of coronavirus cases.

By July 24, maybe covid-19 will have disappeared by then, you know, like a miracle.

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Summer camp was as stilted as spring training was casual. Nobody wanted to catch viral cooties, but what's a batting cage for but to hang out, shoulder to shoulder? How can you tell if your clubhouse prank worked if you can't see a whole face full of anguish? And where's the party if there's no condo pool?

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The Mariners are open for the business of baseball training in Seattle Wednesday. Tuesday in Tacoma and Everett, baseball was closed for the season.

News of the fate of the the Mariners' Class AAA affiliate to the south and the Class A affiliate to the north was no surprise. It is hard is to play baseball without players.

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Puke and all, American sports fans will welcome back Major League Baseball.

Always have. Owners are betting fans always will be there -- even when they aren't permitted to attend in person. The belief has been supported by two bedrock truths:

Fans are suckers.

Owners are monopoly operators.

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We sentimentalize and romanticize baseball like no other American team sport.  Maybe that's why we keep giving it the freedom to break the collective sporting heart. We can't seem to quit on it.

But now might be the easiest time yet to slam the door off its hinges.

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If pro athletes need training camps before the re-start of sports, so do fans.

Here's a prep question for what I'm calling the new covid-based sports world (What? You thought the virus was going away, like a miracle?) to get your sports brain and heart going again:

Will you accept, with understanding, a decision by any of your favorite team's players to sit out games, and perhaps whatever passes for a season, for reasons of personal safety?

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Buried 58 paragraphs into a well-reported story by ESPN.com's baseball staff this week was the money quote regarding the degree of difficulty in re-starting baseball in a pandemic that acts like a stalled hurricane with dozens of on-off switches.

An executive of a risk-management firm, who chairs a Texas task force charged with safely bringing back sports and entertainment, admitted the work "fried my brain" and caused much loss of sleep.

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As everyday life slowly crawls back up to the hilltop from which it was thrown seven weeks ago, some of the daily incremental developments provide a glimpse of hope. Even for the return of sports.

That includes an update from Gov. Jay Inslee Friday that outlined the four phases he and public health officials want the state's citizens to follow, lest we backslide from our quarantine results into an abyss from which even Seahawks coach Pete Carroll can't happy-talk us out of.

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You don't have to be an epidemiologist to have come to an understanding by now that confirmed cases of coronavirus can erupt anytime, anywhere, from an aircraft carrier in Guam to a prison near Seattle to a pork plant in South Dakota. That randomness haunts the nights of every elected in the country, perhaps save one.

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Mocking the stewardship of major league baseball is one of the game's great traditions, as fulfilling as dribbling tobacco juice down a chin, or second-guessing a manager's choice of reliever after the ball winds up in the right-field seats.

But this week, it's time to break from tradition. I have to admire the brain trust of MLB for conjuring up Bubble Ball.

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Note: Along with the rest of MLB, Mariners spring training is shut down as sports copes with the novel coronavirus. Before the doors closed Thursday, Jim Caple caught up with rookie Evan White.

PEORIA, AZ. -- Just 23, 1B Evan White has not played in the major leagues, and played only four games at AAA Tacoma – in 2018. He played the 2019 season with the AA Arkansas Travelers, where he batted .293 with 18 home runs in 92 games.

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Despite a smart, coherent, calm presentation Wednesday morning by Gov. Jay Inslee, executives of King, Pierce and Snohomish counties and Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan that was unique in civic history, my guess is there's still some skepticism about the drastic measures ordered to mitigate (not contain) COVID-19, the disease produced by novel coronavirus.

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