Opening Day Is For Dreamers
When I was in college, I’d skip all of my classes on this day every year, settle into the couch and just watch baseball. The games started at one and ended after midnight, so it was a day-night quadruple-header I looked forward to every April. This probably in no way contributed to my undergraduate studies consuming the better part of a decade. ↵↵Being part of the workforce now, I can no longer be so blatantly irresponsible by putting the more important things in my life on hold for a game. (Only subtly irresponsible by watching on the TV near my desk.) But that doesn’t make me any less excited for Opening Day, when everything is even and anything is possible, including a team that finished last season 20 games back dominating the world champs, or a 22-year-old rookie blasting a home run to dead center in his first major league at bat. ↵
↵↵At The New Ledger, Tom Bridge waxes poetically about the start of a new season, and more specifically about the young players like Jordan Schafer, the aging veterans like Chipper Jones and his baseball dreams that are stirred by reading W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe every spring:↵
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↵⇥It’s this Kinsella speaks to, this he dreams of. To give us in baseball, a tenuous and ghostly connection to the open seat next to us, to imagine there someone we love dearly but is absent, and to think what they might see and love in the game we all shared. This is why I come back to Shoeless Joe, to wake within me the DNA memory of ballgames in the humid Cincinnati night, of the old Coliseum in Oakland, and now at the new Nationals Park. I need to be made whole again, need to be reminded of what was once good, and what will again be good, made complete by those aging players seeking to find their home amongst the Ancestors, and by those who wish to dream of breaking through.↵
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Baseball fans are made whole again today in the form of 12 games, most which will ultimately bare little meaning 162 games from now, but for today mean everything. At least, to a Nationals fan like me, that’s true. The highlight of Washington’s season last year came on Opening Day, when Ryan Zimmerman hit a walk-off homer. I’d imagine for the majority of fans, they’ll look back at this day five months from now as the highlight of the year. Or if nothing else, the peak of their optimism. The day when we’re all allowed to hope, no matter how far-fetched our dreams may be. And as melodramatic as I know that sounds, it’s something I still believe in, and without which, baseball would lose all of its luster.
↵↵Cranking up the dream machine will be the Reds, who host the World Series favorite Mets at 1:10 in a wintry mix at the Great American Ball Park. From there, we’re treated to C.C. Sabathia making his first start in pinstripes in Baltimore, a Zambrano vs. Oswalt duel in Houston, the revamped A’s finishing the day against the Angels, and much more in between. ↵
↵↵Enjoy the games. And don’t let the baseball-haters bring you down. Instead, just be grateful that you’re able to appreciate this game and just how special today really is. ↵
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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.
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