It was, in the final quarter of the horrible 2020, when it seemed as though society had finally succumbed to its own appetites and irresponsibility, that baseball was somehow being made an example of. So much loss could not be happenstance. Seven Hall of Famers — signatures to their time and instrumental to the landscape of the modern, postwar game as we know it — died that year, five between early September (Lou Brock, 81) and late December (Phil Niekro, 81). Before them, in April, it was Al Kaline, Mr. Tiger, who died at 85. And in August, Tom Seaver, the great "Tom Terrific," at 75. Over a nine-day period in October, while the Los Angeles Dodgers were winning the World Series of a truncated MLB season, Bob Gibson, 84, Whitey Ford, 91, and Joe Morgan, 77, all passed. Twenty days before Niekro, another pillar of his time, Dick Allen, died at age 78, too soon and incomplete, his deserved Hall of Fame induction routinely denied a man who loved a game that rarely, if ever, loved him back.

The year was merciless, and when it ended, baseball people did what most everyone does at the end of a brutal calendar year, they look to the new year for hope — and grace.

They did not find it. The new year did not relent. Tommy Lasorda died on Jan. 7 at age 93. Eleven days later, Don Sutton, 75, and four days after that, the towering Henry Aaron at age 86. More metaphorical than sinister, their passage served as a message being sent across the sport — for a game that relies on continuity, yesterday will no longer be tomorrow. It was a message dubiously heeded in real time by the people who run baseball. And through the combination, 2021 turned pivotal, beginning with those three Hall of Famers dying, and ending without a game at all, the owners imposing a lockout in response to its labor impasse. A door has closed.

Time is calling. One day during the summer, the MLB Network was on my television airing "The Cobra at Twilight," the documentary of Pittsburgh Pirates great Dave Parker who won a World Series title with the Pirates in 1979 and then bashed his way to another with Oakland a decade later. When he played, the great "Parkway" was the epitome of carefree size and strength, vitality and dominance. At 6-foot-5 and 230 pounds, the indomitable Cobra made 6-2, 200-pound Jim Rice look small when they shared the April 9, 1979 cover of "Sports Illustrated," as reigning MVPs on top of the world.

Now, Parker is under attack, relentlessly, by the irreversible effects of Parkinson's disease. "Thank goodness for my memories," he says in the documentary. "My memories are all I have." He wrote a memoir in 2021 with his co-author Dave Jordan, and did so with an urgency at once resigned and resolute. "If I didn't do it now," he told me, "I don't know how much more time I would have to do it."