Opening Day Declared Religious Holiday

For a baseball purist like myself, Opening Day is like Christmas. It's pretty much the greatest event of the year outside of the annual hot-dog eating contest at Coney Island.

Opening Day is a tradition at the beginning of every new Major League Baseball season. Falling somewhere around the beginning of the month of April, it signals a newness and a chance to forget the past season, a spring-cleaning of sorts, a place every team and their millions of fans begin the season with a perfect record on Opening Day -- unless you count that trumped-up Sunday night game that ESPN has aired the past 10 years. By the end of opening day of baseball, though, 50 percent of the teams are wondering why they lost.It's a scene that returns reassuringly year after year.

The intense Crayola green of the manicured field, the perfect 90-degree corners exactly 90 feet apart, the men in uniform palpably itching with eagerness as they await the first "thwap" of a little white ball smacking into the catcher's mitt.

Since the first professional Opening Day in 1876, the ritual has unfolded according to an invisible plan. The first pitch generally yields to nine engrossing innings and the sadly mistaken belief it will go on forever. A rich history of special events have occurred on Opening Day, that includes President William Howard Taft throwing out the ceremonial first pitch in 1910, beginning a tradition for presidents, Jackie Robinson becoming the first African-American player in the major leagues in 1947, and Hank Aaron hitting home run No. 714 to tie Babe Ruth's record in 1974.

Joe DiMaggio once said of opening day, "You look forward to it like a birthday party when you're a kid. You think something wonderful is going to happen.This year I am going to Fenway on Opening Day.

So in honor of my pilgrimage to the Mecca of baseball, I am boldly declaring Opening Day a quasi-religious holiday that justifies work stoppage. So if you play hooky from work one day a year, this is the day to do it.

The boys of summer are back in town. Play Ball!