Happy Opening Day
On the off-chance that you both frequent this very independent website and somehow also happen to be a baseball person, please forgive me if I’ve got my innings mixed up, and I likely have — for the last 48 hours or so have been a mostly pleasant blur of fair balls and curveballs and cutters, and announcers saying magical things like you should try to hit the largest snowflake if you’re at bat in a bit of snowfall.
The unbalanced economy of European football, and the savagery of the NFL (less on the field, sometimes, than in front offices), and the current state of the Eastern Conference standings in the NBA, all remind me just how much I love baseball when there isn’t any on. But saying this just now would be an insult to a very busy offseason. I had virtually no concept who Nolan Arenado was ’til my St. Louis Cardinals pulled a faster trigger than they’re known for and got a deal done, and then there’s all that business with the Mets takeover, and Trevor Bauer signing for the Los Angeles ‘Lord-Can-They-Get-Any-Better’ Dodgers.
Last season’s indie darlings the San Diego Padres somehow got both Blake Snell (Tampa Bay Rays) and (the coolest name in baseball) Yu Darvish (Chicago Cubs) on the payroll, and extended the mercurial Fernando Tatis Jr. by a decade and a half and also 340-mil. Just reading all the contract stuff, all the trade talk and all the possibilities, it feels like it’s been baseball season since January. But then a pitcher steps up to the mound, and the first hitter on the order stares him down, swinging his slugger around like a sword, and you get a certain flutter inside your tum. It’s not April Fools’, for us fortunate few: it’s Opening Day.
I caught the Yankees as they caught a home L to the Toronto Blue Jays, who I understand have invested considerably themselves, and it was good to see the crisp uniforms, and all the familiar faces, and all the pissed-off New Yorkers. Having come of age in love with electric starting pitchers (Roy Halladay, Tim Lincecum, Darvish, and Steven Strausburg, particularly), I realise in my old age that what I really care about is hitting; and so whilst I was glad to see the Yankees drop one in the Bronx, it was dispiriting to see Aaron Judge, Gleber Torres, and Giancarlo Stanton all mostly swing at air.
On a break Karl Ravech, who’s hosted Baseball Tonight since forever, got Blue Jays shortstop Bo Bichette (the kid can hit!) to discuss how he’s spent his isolation downtime. Bichette said he likes to make music or something, so Ravech got him singing a Bieber tune on television, and somehow baseball Internet found that less cringey than Ravech not knowing ‘Peaches’ isn’t a Bichette original.
A quite exotic cat ran onto Coors Field, and towards Dodgers outfielder Cody Bellinger, prompting one colour commentator to remark that that gave us a pretty solid idea about its gender; another to bemoan (sheesh) does absolutely everybody want to be on the freaking Dodgers now? Bellinger, by the way, has a fear of cats.
It’s sheer narrative, I think, that sets the game apart. The shorthanded and therefore rather young Cardinals got six points on the board in the first inning alone against the Cincinnati Reds, and I like to think they could spend the season simply out-working deeper rosters. After a quiet spring training, one recognises the genius of Arenado is what quiet work he puts in, filler stuff like irretrievable runs, to turn the bases yellow. (Let’s maybe discuss his defensive athleticism when the highlight reels have a tad more Cardinals red in them …) The American League MVP Jose Abreu began the season by striking its first grand slam homer against an extremely good-looking Angels side (that, I understand, begins the season with work to do defensively). I thought watching him round the bases was like watching a wolf run laps with its bounty between its teeth.
The sport, like all the American pastimes, still has a pandemic problem — a not-so-robust collection of protocols that just tosses talent in the firing line and continues to hope for the best. (A golden fixture pitting Francisco Lindor and the millionaire Mets against the Competent Nationals has yet to field a single inning.) There’s also the more tribal oddity of the National League — American baseball’s (ahem) more eccentric conference — still forcing its teams to operate without a designated hitter. This basically keeps in place the quaint practise of requiring starting pitchers to enter the batting order, I presume because (without a DH) there aren’t quite enough roster spots to fill out an inning.
Growing up, this always struck me as a pretty unique way to determine who the most complete players in the game were — but I didn’t watch nearly enough baseball to know that the rule is pure cosmetics, and now actually one I oppose. The sheer number of pitchers who’ve undergone Tommy John surgery, as a sort of rite of passage into pitching fastballs in the Major League, is argument enough that they ought have the right to specialise. That said, it was fun to see Philadelphia’s Zach Wheeler shut out the Atlanta Braves of all lineups, before rubbing it all in with a base hit that enabled Jean Segura to score a run. Imagine, if you will, Harry Kane or Kyle Walker having to frequently keep goal.
I have taken to asking myself, a lot, what I could live without if my circumstances suddenly required it, largely to try and address the possibility that I may have a sports problem. Grand slam tennis is gone long enough to just keep, er, subsisting. The Patriots better draft a young quarterback at month-end, and put aside all mention of trading for gentlemen that can’t stay healthy. I think the Boston Celtics could do with an off-season, and are testament to the difficulty of winning incrementally when COVID enters your locker room. I can barely watch Tottenham Hotspur at the moment but this is mere tradition, a return to natural order.
So, please, the gods, the heavens, the government, never take away baseball; I couldn’t possibly live without the dry wit that writes itself precisely because we’re all just sitting around waiting for stuff to happen — the charming etiquette the players can once again show the fans, before they dive back into the bullpen — and the umpires and their penchant for performance, making signals in irate people’s faces.
Happy Opening Day, everybody.
