Opening Days

It was Opening Day recently, a time when all teams were tied for first place for at least a day and when you felt maybe this year your team had a chance.

It’s when hope springs eternal, to quote Alexander Pope (although baseball wasn’t around yet when Pope, the English satirist, stuck his quill in ink and wrote that). Or, if you’re more contemporary and are not afraid to admit knowing it, it’s a song off an Air Supply album. (I once was lassoed into seeing an Air Supply “concert” at a Christian college; they didn’t turn off the auditorium lights for fear that someone could be overcome by the music and fall in love with somebody.)

There was a time when Opening Day was the greatest day of the year for me – other than Christmas. It came when the harsh winter of northern Minnesota where I grew up was coming to a close and it meant my elementary and high schools would soon end for the year. The grass was greener, the air felt fresher and it seemed we could hit the whiffle ball a little further in our backyard games.

But lately it hasn’t meant as much to me. A case in point is that I’m just now writing about it, nearly two weeks after Opening Day.

Sure, I watched the scores, and I still will. I tried to find the Twins’ opening game on a Minnesota radio station on the internet, but the game was cancelled due to cold weather. I ended up “watching” the Cubs’ opener against Milwaukee on MLB.com’s "Gameday" website.

Had I wanted to listen that game I’d have to subscribe to a website service. At an economic time when I don’t even have cable, I couldn’t justify spending the money on that. I couldn’t imagine telling the wife, “We can’t pay the light bill, but, by golly, we can listen to the A's-Blue Jays' game.”

Maybe I’m losing the excitement of Opening Day merely because I am older. The age difference between me and the players is widening each year. When I was a kid, I looked up to the players, thinking they were grown up heroes. Now, I think they’re spoiled kids and I think the team owners are, for the most part, tight-fisted, greedy men. Business has invaded the purity and magic of a child’s vision of baseball.

Maybe it’s because baseball has changed. “Ghost runners” in extra innings? Designated hitters in the National League? Clayton Kershaw being pulled after pitching five perfect innings (against my Twins) because of his pitch count? What’s happened to the game? Can you imagine Red Schoendienst sauntering to the mound to pull Bob Gibson on Opening Day 1968 because Gibson was nearing 100 pitches? Gibson would have decked Red and then kept on hurling.

Maybe it’s simply because the enthusiasm of being a kid, the enjoyment of things like Opening Day, has been pushed to the back burner of my consciousness, replaced by grocery lists, meeting the monthly bill nut, trying to stay healthy, being a good provider and all.

But there still is some sense of an Opening Day I can feel. It’s with our APBA game. I’ve done baseball replays since 1998 and I began rolling the dice with the game company in 1977 when my parents bought me the APBA football game.

Obviously, I’ve not had an Opening Day each year. It takes a long while to complete a full-season replay. It took me nearly four years to play the entire 1991 season because life stepped in. During that replay, I met my wife-to-be, was laid off from my newspaper job of 20 years and had a scary health situation. The games were no longer a priority.

But there are still Opening Days in APBA. They don’t necessarily coincide with the real Opening Day of any season. I began the 1965 baseball season I’m on now back in December 2020. My Opening Day of the 1972 I’m planning to do next will probably be near the end of June.

I’ve had Opening Days for APBA’s hockey game, too. And despite being so much older than when I first started this hobby, there’s still that charge of seeing my hand-written standings page. The won-lost columns are blank because the games have yet to be played. On Opening Day, replayers begin the journey of a season, learning the teams’ stars, the pitching rotations and lineups. Someone will hit the season’s first home run and away we go. After that first game is over, I write in pencil the "1" under either the two teams' won and lost columns.  And it begins.

So, despite not getting too worked up for the real Opening Day, I still have a venue to feel the excitement I did when I was a kid. I’ve had 13 Opening Days since rolling the baseball game and each one brought back those memories of the real day when the players took the fields.