Tuesday, March 25, 2008

A Word On Opening Day

This morning I said something about how I'm having trouble embracing today's game in Tokyo. Just to be clear, that trouble has little to do with the fact that it's taking place in Japan. This article and all of its thinly veiled xenophobia, for example, is just dumb.

No, setting isn't my problem. My problem is that despite this official opening of the regular season, there are still spring training games going on, and this has thrown off my equilibrium.

I watched a little bit of the A's-Red Sox game before work, and my mind said "Yay! The regular season has started!" Then I sat at my computer and scanned this morning's headlines and I was momentarily discombobulated, thinking that the news about, say, the Yankees renaming their field, or performances in yesterday's games were regular season stories. It only lasted a millisecond, but it was disorienting all the same. It will probably continue until Sunday night.

To me, the beauty of opening day has little to do with freshly cut grass, azure skies, and red, white, and blue bunting. Really, I don't care if the regular season starts in Tokyo, Singapore, Lisbon, or Lahore. Opening day does, however, have everything to do with new beginnings, and when you still have the final returns of the exhibition season trickling in, the fresh start that is the promise of opening day is diminished.

So in the future, start the season wherever you'd like. Just make sure that when it starts it really starts.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I could not agree more! The first thing I did this morning, besides watch the end of the game, is make sure I had my fantasy teams set and redirected my home page to mlb.com. Then I got excited to meet my friends at the pub and.....

....then I went to work instead with absolutely no idea what planet I was on.

Mac said...

I am stunned. When I saw you had linked to an AJC column, I figured it was Furman Bisher ranting about Pearl Harbor.