Opening Day!

Is anyone else as excited for opening day as I am?!  It feels like the real start of spring to me.  It’s funny, because it wasn’t until I moved to Pittsburgh that I really started enjoying baseball games. (Insert Pirates joke here).  Spring is such a time of rebirth, and I love that every year we start the season with a clean slate.

President Kennedy throws in the first pitch on opening day, 1961. Image from the National Archives.

 

It took me such a long time to get into baseball because, well, I always thought it was kind of boring.  I love watching hockey and soccer, and baseball is about as far away from those fast-paced sports as you can get.  But after being convinced to attend a few games, I found that it started to grow on me.  It would be hard to say exactly why.  It’s something to do with the building of tension when you have two outs and the bases loaded, or the fierce loyalty of the fans.  Or the feeling of waiting anxiously for a home run.  Or the fact that spending a summer afternoon or evening outside watching a game is just a really fun way to spend some time.

Of course, baseball also seems to have more quirky lore than other sports, and that might be the thing that really puts it close to my heart.  Sure, you can dig up interesting trivia about football or hockey or any other sport, but have you ever heard of a football player burying their pet monkey under the goal posts?  (Have you ever even heard of a football player owning a pet monkey?)  Some of the stories in books like Ball Four make athletes of other sports seem tame, and the Pirates’ own Dock Ellis set the bar pretty high for crazy athlete exploits. 

Only a few more days until the start of the season, and I for one can’t wait.

-Irene