Opening Day in Baseball: The Third Best Day of the Year

April 5 is quickly approaching and I am starting to get excited. You may be asking yourself what is on April 5? Well if you are, then you must not be a baseball fan, for April 5 is opening day. Now some of you may be saying wait a second chief the season starts on Sunday April 4, and technically you would be right. Major League Baseball and ESPN years ago teamed up to ruin tradition for the sake of a few extra dollars, but that doesn't mean I have to except it. Between a Sunday night game to kick off the season and sending a couple of random teams to Japan to start the season several days before the rest of the league, they have tried to kill the traditional Monday kickoff. I remember the days when the Cincinnati Reds had the first scheduled game of the season. It was a nice little tradition that was just done away with , like so many others, to bow down to the almighty television networks.

This year the Sunday opening night game features the New York Yankees traveling to Boston to take on the Red Sox. This doesn't even begin to make sense to me. The Red Sox and the Yankees will sell out any time of the year, so why not help a team along and have Yankees take on the Royals in Kansas City or the Red Sox versus the Blue Jays in Toronto. It is opening night, don't you think that that, in and of itself, will draw people to the television and maybe more importantly to the ballpark. I think the teams that are struggling with attendance should start the season at home, that way they can take advantage of the hope a new season brings.

Baseball's Sunday opening night kind of reminds of something else I don't like, the play in in game in the NCAA basketball tournament. Both exist just to make a little extra money. Both seem completely out of place. Finally both have little names the leagues want you to use, so that you don't realize how ridiculous they really are. The NCAA wants you to call the first game the opening round game, and the first full day of action the first round. I won't even try to understand how there is a round before the first round. While baseball wants you to call the first game opening night so that the next day can be called opening day. Oh those tricky marketing people at MLB really have us all snowed.

Now I know that I may be in the minority when it comes to baseball and tradition. Many may just see these changes as improvements, but I see it as the destruction of traditions we won't be able to get back. I still love baseball and opening day is my third favorite day of the year, but I can't help recall James Earl Jones as Terrence Mann in the movie Field of Dreams saying, "The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again." The strike of 1994 made the game lose a lot of that charm and it seems that MLB and others are hell bent on destroying what little is left.