The season is only several weeks old, but the stretch run of September is already here.

A short season with new rules played amid a pandemic and leading to a 16-team postseason is unlike anything in baseball history. Might as well get ready for a wild, unpredictable September.

September will have more games with playoff implications than ever before. It almost surely will lead to ties for playoff seeding that will be broken by a series of tiebreaker rules (first: intradivision record). It will be packed with doubleheaders. It will be greatly influenced by COVID-19; as the days dwindle, there is even less room to make up games when outbreaks occur.

To prepare you for the mad dash in what already is a sprint of a season, here are the most pressing questions as we enter a September unlike any other:

1. What was the overriding theme of the trade