Handling the Curve: COVID-19 and Major League Baseball leverages our national pastime, and specifically the 2020 baseball season, to explore individual stories and our collective social experience from a year that powerfully impacted us all. 2020 was a season unlike any in baseball history. As in countless other areas of life that year, the pandemic transformed the game into a funhouse version of itself: upended, bizarre, often heart-breaking. At the same time, baseball offered comfort to many, even from a mandatory distance, in its recognizable rhythms and human connection.

Handling the Curve includes artifacts and photographs from Major League teams, oral histories, 3D models and cutting edge data visualizations presented in mixed reality to investigate Covid’s impact on our national pastime during the 2020 season, as well as public health consequences of the virus for the communities surrounding the stadiums where baseball is played.