Opening Day

As I sit here on my couch, the Anaheim Angels and Texas Rangers have just opened the 2003 major league baseball season on ESPN. Although the season will symbolically begin tomorrow afternoon in Cincinnati as always, honoring the 1869 birth of professional baseball with the formation of the Cincinnati Red Stockings club, the presentation of the World Series trophy and the raising of the world championship pennant tell me that it’s Opening Day.

Some might say that baseball has gone out of fashion. NFL football is undoubtedly the most popular sport in America, and for all its image problems that cause many (including me) to openly hate it, NBA basketball is probably number two. The 1994 strike alienated many baseball fans who didn’t return until the 1998 home run race. More recently, the growing divide between rich and poor clubs, which causes 5-7 teams to start every year knowing that they don’t stand a chance of reaching the playoffs, has left many fans feeling cheated out of seeing meaningful games.

But we keep coming back. Why? Well, maybe it’s…

• a summer evening in a small, neatly-kept stadium in Salem, VA, watching a bottom-of-the-tenth home run rise over the right-field fence and disappear into the Blue Ridge Mountains
• last year’s World Series, watching a club without superstars, previously best known for the Donnie Moore tragedy, win the first world championship in their 42-year history by embracing teamwork and fundamentals instead of playing for SportsCenter
• taking a visiting English friend from E2 to his first game ever, breaking out the scorecards to teach baseball by immersion
• the summer I spent heading over to The Diamond after my J. Sarge evening bio class, catching a few free innings each night after they opened the gates at the bottom of the fifth
• teaching an Indian co-worker about the game after he signed up to play softball in the company league, using a whiteboard to diagram the field and a miniature hockey stick to demonstrate a batting stance and the strike zone in my cube
• a community as small as Princeton, West Virginia having its own team, with players living with local residents during the season and every business on Route 460 hanging a “GO RAYS!” sign along the highway
• the kids at local minor-league games, all wearing their Little League uniforms and baseball gloves, chasing every foul ball within three sections

Or maybe it’s just the sense of innocence and fun that is so lost in the rest of the sports world.

Now, I love Virginia Tech football. But it all seems so deadly serious at times — every game could make or break our national championship hopes, and fans live and die with each play. Perspective is hard to come by — a season feels like a war, and each game is a battle, whether a rout (Rutgers) or a long siege (Miami). The atmosphere in the stands can easily cross the line separating enthusiasm from viciousness.

Hockey has the juxtaposition of incredible strength and grace with the most shameless (though also the most honest) violence of any professional sport. Especially in the minors, it’s almost disappointing when you don’t see a fight or two, despite the fact that the game doesn’t need it to be exciting. You would see more dangerous stickwork and more cheap hits — knee-on-knee or from behind — without fighting, but fighting still takes something away from what can be such a beautiful sport without it.

I sometimes wonder, in my less geopolitically-lucid moments, if some of the roots of soccer’s popularity in Europe can be found in its resemblance to the wars that have racked Europe for a millenium. In those wars and in soccer, you often get long periods of dramatic back-and-forth that contribute nothing to the result, and then a silly quirk of fate or a bad referee’s call decides the whole thing. It doesn’t seem possible to be a casual fan of European soccer — the stadium atmosphere at the middle-of-the-standings game I attended was even crazier (and more hostile) than a VT football game. (American soccer is, of course, vastly different — it’s mostly a kids’ night out.) It’s also interesting that international soccer is one of the last contexts in which Europeans feel it’s okay to display patriotism.

But baseball?

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 that could be again.
     — Field of Dreams

Play ball.