If the president and the prime minister of Canada asked me to add an extra holiday to the calendar, it would take less than a second to respond: Opening Day.

Everything is fresh today. Every team (except the Phillies and Atlanta) is 0-0 and even the Washington Nationals, Baltimore Orioles and Pittsburgh Pirates can have delusions about being in the race. Of course, when we made that list last year, many of us ended it with “…and the Tampa Bay Rays…”

Sometimes delusions take you for an unexpected ride. We have some experience with worst-to-first baseball in these parts.

No mountain seems too big today, If Joe Mauer plays 70 games, so what? We have Red Dog and the kid Morales to fill his role. Joe Crede batted .122 against lefties last season? Must have been his back. Brian Buscher fields like TC Bear? No big thing.

Those concerns are for tomorrow, or whenever.

Today is when you get to the ballpark a little bit earlier, and take in all the stuff outside the Dome and inside, knowing there will be no “outside the Dome” in 2010 and Opening Day will in all likelihood to be during the day at the new Target Field. It’ll also be subject to being Opening Tomorrow if the weather doesn’t cooperate. The Dome is a flawed beast, but it has provided us with a constancy that has spoiled us about playing games when they are scheduled.

Today is when you cheer a little bit louder when Crede and R.A. Dickey are introduced, letting them know you hope it works out for them. Of course, we did that for Tony Batista in Section 220 a few years back and look what it got us. You can figure who the people nearby have as their favorites when they cheer louder during the pregame introductions. (Nick Blackburn and Redmond in Section 220, Row 1, Seat 2 — the Ms. Baseball seat.) And I’ll cheer with Ken Griffey Jr. is introduced and then hope he strikes out three times, misplays two fly balls and grounds into a double play.

Today is when you think about the baseball games that are stuck in your memory.  Right now, that’s the 1971 opener between the Cubs and Cardinals. Our posse got to Wrigley Field at 7 a.m. to score grandstand seats and it was cold as hell. The good news was that Billy Williams took Bob Gibson deep in the 10th inning and the Cubs won 2-1. Almost as good was they played the game in less than two hours. I love that baseball-reference.com describes the wind that day as being “17 mph in unknown direction.” I know better. It was blowing right at me.

Today is different from last week. Ask me a few days ago and I tell you that, despite the hype from others, the Twins have the look of a second-place team. Today, they win it all. You’ll have to wait a little while for me to have a more reasonable answer to that one because that’s what Opening Day does.

Enjoy.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 10:14 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.