Does any sport screw up their opening day quite like Major League Baseball? It wasn’t so long ago that the opening day for the baseball season was an event. After a long winter and way too much of the cold weather, high intensity sports such as football and basketball, opening day held the promise of a long, warm and lazy summer. Opening day also was uniquely positioned in the sports calender just at the time when we are primed and ready to go for an all-day sporting event, a tolerance built up over weeks of NCAA basketball games. MLB should capitalize on this.
Instead, they water it down. The first game this season was played at 5:00 in the morning here, but primetime in Japan where it was held. WTF? Japan for the opening game of America’s sport? Then, there was opening night on Sunday in Washington, D.C. nearly two weeks later. The Braves opened up a 1 game series (again, wtf? A one game series?) against the Nationals. Then, finally, opening day which consisted of what? That’s right, a bunch of 1 game series being played out.
Whatever. Finally, baseball was in full swing. Now I could look forward to knowing that if I wanted to, thanks to satellite tv and my slingbox, I could watch a game at nearly anytime of the day. Indeed, this is one of the great things about the baseball season. It’s long. And I don’t mean that the season goes just a little over what you think would be necessary to shake out the good from the bad and declare a champion. I mean that it is unbelievably long. But not in a bad way. It’s not waiting-for-water-to-boil long, it’s more like, I-can’t-believe-we’ve-been-friends-since-the-8th-grade long. The kind of long that you can get used to. It’s familiar. You start to rely on it. The games themselves are long, the season is long, the postseason is long. My God, spring training takes nearly two full months. But this is a good thing. It’s what makes baseball what it is. This reliability and familiarity define it as a sport and make it stand out in the athletic tableau.
So what do you suppose happens on the day after opening day? That’s right, just a handful of games played. Why? What could possibly be the point of this? Why build up all of this momentum and then put on the brakes? There is nothing else going on in the world that MLB can’t compete with. This is like if, on a flight from San Francisco to New York the pilot came on the speaker and said “Ah, folks, we’re making pretty good time here after some early turbulence, but we’re gonna dial it down to about 40 knots for a while so you can enjoy Iowa just a little bit.” It makes no sense.
I mean, could you possibly fubar this any more?
