... waxing poetic about Opening Day

Baseball Opening Day is upon us. Well, technically the first regular season game is tonight, but I always think it's Opening DAY, not Opening Night. Until the first game is played with the Cincinnati Reds (the Reds traditionally play the first game of the season) then I don't consider the season to have started.

I follow a lot of sports, some closer than others, and to me nothing compares to Opening Day in baseball. There is something to the pomp, the pageantry, the sense of occasion that is just different in baseball. Football has jets flying overhead and big concerts and fireworks, but to me it doesn't feel the same as when the players first run onto the field, the stadium decorated in bunting.

It's the start of a campaign. It's the start of a long days and short sleeves. It's the start of a streak or a slump: both of which will be broken and will be mirror images of each other. It's when you stop thinking in terms of days of the week and in terms of pitchers in the rotation. It's the start of surrendering your passions over to something you have no control over. The die is cast, and the hope in the air.

That is what baseball has more than any other sport: hope. The season is long, the game is not played against a clock, and teams play each other so many times that they can adapt to each other. Earl Waver put it best:

You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the damn plate and give the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all.

On Opening Day everyone is equal and everyone has the same chance, and there IS a chance. A few years ago the Detroit Tigers were a laughing stock and had the worst record ever in the major leagues, and then two years after that they were in the World Series. The Minnesota Twins were considered so helpless that they were rumored to be candidates for a move or contraction, and now they are contenders in the AL Central. Every year a team that was supposed to be a write off comes out of nowhere and makes a good run for the playoffs: Florida, Philadelphia, Oakland, and of course Tampa Bay last year. Meanwhile teams that were supposed to be locks can have a year that for, mysterious reasons, never seems to take off: both New York teams, the Cubbies, Cleveland. And it all starts on Opening Day, one day when the Royals and the Rays have the same chance as he As and the Astros.

Michael Chabon wrote in Summerland that "Baseball is the length by which we measure a summer's day". It's a slow game, a contemplative game, a game that you can't explain in a sentence. It's a game that runs counter to most people's understanding of a game: the defense has the ball, there's no clock, a team game based purely on individual accomplishments. But , as George Carlin pointed out there is something universal in it: The object is to get home.

And in that first week in April, one way or another, we all start to look home