Sunday, April 4, 2010: Baseball’s Opening Day. On Easter Sunday no less. Springtime. When a young man’s thoughts turn to …playing ball.
Former baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti captured the feeling that the game brings to so many of us in “The Green Fields of the Mind “, reminding us of the common thread that the game weaves through our lives. The optimism of spring, when things begin anew, the summer days and evenings filled with games, and finally, the chill that comes at the end of the season:
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
In a sense, men’s fastball already had its opening day back on the afternoon of January 21, 2010, when the first set of games of the 2010 AAU International Tournament were played. But with most players putting the gloves away for the rest of winter when they returned from Orlando, I suspect most fastballers consider the spring to be the “start” of the 2010 season.
For some of us in the warmer regions like California, the season kicked off a couple weeks ago when the SCIFL opened their season at Santa Fe Springs. But no matter. Today is the opening day for Major League Baseball, and reason in and of itself to celebrate its return, and get us all thinking about the fastball season ahead. The team rosters will start rolling in, with all of us perusing them to see which players are back with their old teams, which ones are being being fitted for new uniforms, and what new players arrive onto the radar. The first set of ISC team rankings can’t be far behind.
And so it is. Springtime. Opening Day. When everything else begins again….