A mostly unromantic salute to Opening Day
Yes, in case you didn't know, today is the first day of the baseball season
I tried it once.
As a young sportswriter, in Ardmore, I think, though it could have been Woodward, I wrote an ode to Opening Day.
I loved baseball, of course, and could watch nine whole innings, or 18 if I had the night off and ESPN had the games. I read all about the game, too, most of it by authors who saw it romantically.
“The Seventh Game,” fiction from Roger Kahn my dad gave me may have been the first book I tore through for pleasure. Pretty sure I was in high school, perhaps a freshman, because soon after I was passing Dan Jenkins’ “Semi-Tough” around in sophomore biology.
I saw the diamond through that lens.
The only sport without a clock, played in a park, blah, blah, blah.
So, I tried writing one of those columns.
I may once have argued “pitchers and catchers report” to be the greatest four words ever put together in the language, and if you don’t know the phrase just ask a 50-something baseball fan.
Silliness. But maybe necessary.
I was searching for my voice, a voice, some voice, any voice. So I did my best, trying to find an authentic me I could put into words.
Now?
I think about baseball nostalgically sometimes, but not romantically.
Even though my favorite sports movie is “The Natural” and even though my favorite line is when Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) asks Iris Gaines (Glenn Close) why she stood to watch him hit that day in Chicago and she answers, “I didn’t want to see you fail,” … No, I don’t see it romantically.
But today is Opening Day and I’m all about it.
Some will tell you it’s not Opening Day.
They’ll tell you Opening Day is Thursday, because today there is only one game, the Yankees and Giants, from San Francisco, and it’s a night game rather than a day game. It’s on Netflix, and only Netflix, and what kind of an Opening Day is on Netflix?
Doesn’t bother me.
One game, one audience.
If we’re watching baseball Opening Day, why not watch the same game?
Do you know what the best thing about baseball season is?
It’s always on. They play every day. Or every night.
It begins when it begins and, but for the All-Star break and travel days built into the postseason, it never ends.
They talk about sports going dead in the summer?
The NBA Finals end, the Stanley Cup Finals end and college football doesn’t begin until September, so what are we supposed to do?
What do you mean what are we supposed to do?
You’ve got baseball every day, and tennis and golf majors.
Nothing wrong with that.
You can look it up, but more folks watch Major League Baseball in local markets than the NBA. That is, fewer Ohioans tune in for the Cavaliers on a random December Wednesday than for the Guardians on a random May Wednesday.
If you can believe it, four of the last six World Series have drawn more viewers than the NBA Finals.
Maybe somebody should tell ESPN.
I go back to this.
If you could only read about one sport the rest of your life, what would it be?
It would be baseball.
You’d never run out.
Are the best highlights dunks and 3s, sacks and acrobatic catches, or catches that bring home runs back, miraculous double plays and towering shots in the ninth?
It’s catches that bring home runs back, miraculous double plays and towering shots in the ninth.
Back in the day, in a three- or four-channel world, before cable changed the world, when you could already watch four or five NFL games each week but only two baseball games, Saturday afternoon and Monday night, we still wanted to slide like Pete Rose, slug like Reggie Jackson, hit like Rod Carew, run like Rickey Henderson and Tim Raines and pitch like Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton and Nolan Ryan.
We dug Roger Staubach, but it wasn’t the same.
And because we collected cards and memorized the numbers on the back, we literally knew more about baseball than anything else.
OK, that might be a little romantic.
These days, my baseball digest includes almost no complete games, but whip-around coverage of several. That and highlight packages, before sleeping or after waking, of every game I’ve yet to know the winner.
Like waking up to boxscores, only better.
Today, baseball begins.
Tomorrow, it really begins.
Every day after, into October, it continues.
What’s better?