There is no forever in baseball statistics.
The concept is too fraught to mean anything: Every record, as the saying goes, is made to be broken. The game simply keeps moving. The players fade, and trends evolve, but the sport always finds a way to get better—faster, smarter, harder. When the balance of power shifts toward pitching, eventually, inevitably, it will swing back toward hitting. There are plenty of records that will stand for decades. But everyone knows it’s folly to take the over on forever: Watch long enough, and everything can happen twice, or maybe even more.
Yet even in all of that—even up against the stubborn reality of forever—it feels all but impossible to imagine a future version of baseball where any pitcher and catcher will ever do what Adam Wainwright and Yadier Molina did on Wednesday.
