For many Americans, the start of spring has nothing to do with the equinox or March 21. It begins only when a voice of authority shouts, “Play ball!”
That made Thursday, the scheduled first day of the 2020 major league season, extra sad.
Baseball has survived a lot of disruptions. A labor dispute postponed opening day by two weeks in 1972. The start of WWII threatened the 1942 season until President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote a letter to the commissioner that tied the game to the nation’s morale. “I honestly feel it would be best for the country to keep baseball going,” he wrote.
But war and the bargaining table could not do what COVID-19 has done. Never has opening day seemed more distant, or more uncertain.
So it’s time to say something profound, no matter how silly it may sound to some. Opening day, if it doesn’t exist on the field, has to exist in the heart.
The essence of opening day is optimism and hope. As many fans feel it, when birds are singing and trees and flowers begin to bud, the feeling of renewal breathes life into the notion that maybe, just maybe, this is the year your team can win it all.
This year, the birds and the budding will have to do without the crack of a bat and the pop of a glove. But the hope and optimism still need to thrive.
The world is going through a pandemic unlike anything seen in several generations. In the United States, it feels as if life has shut down. People huddle in their homes, afraid to get within six feet of another human.
But it’s going to end — hopefully sooner than later, and without many more casualties. Opening day may not come until the heat of summer, but it will come.
After all, anticipating a fun thing can at times be more exciting than experiencing it. That may be hard to imagine for baseball fans, but it gives a reason for hope.
When he first came to Salt Lake City in the mid-1990s to take over the city’s new triple-A baseball team, known then as the Buzz, owner Joe Buzas told a Deseret News reporter, with great emotion, that a highlight of his life was taking the field as the starting shortstop for the New York Yankees on opening day, April 17, 1945. He played only a few games in the majors, but that day was something special.
The boxscore shows he got a hit in four times at bat, driving in a run and scoring one himself as the Yankees beat Boston, 8-4.
Early Wynn, a Hall of Fame pitcher who played from the 1930s to the ’60s, played a lot of games. It’s hard to imagine, after a while, that many of them got his heart racing. But opening day always gave him butterflies. “There’s that little extra excitement, a faster beating of the heart,” he once said.
Or maybe the great Joe DiMaggio said it best. “You look forward to it like a birthday party when you’re a kid,” he said. “You think something wonderful is going to happen.”
A lot of fans feel the same way, not just as kids, but way into adulthood and old age. It’s why so many sports channels, on radio and TV, replayed old games in their entirety Thursday.
We think it’s safe to say that no sport cherishes its history the way baseball does.
Fans can tell you that Bob Feller threw a no-hitter on opening day in 1940. If the fan is old enough, he might remember seeing Hank Aaron tie Babe Ruth’s all-time home run mark with his first swing in the first game of 1974.
Take heart. The game wouldn’t revere its history if it didn’t have a future. COVID-19 won’t have the last word.