Hope On Opening Day

The opening day of baseball season is usually one of the happiest days of the year for me. It comes in with the spring, a sign of hope and new life. During the season baseball is my daily friend, a needed and consistent quotidian diversion.

This spring was the worst of my life and there was no baseball to cut through the despair. April, when even the Mets could be in first place, brimmed over with mass death and fear. That month here in my Jersey town the obituaries came fast and hard. I longed for any kind of dumb distratction and my favorite go-to was gone.

It is surreal to see a baseball season starting today in the blazing heat of the dog days of summer, which is normally the fulcrum of the long 162 game slog. I guess that's only appropriate, since every other facet of our lives has been thrown into flux. Now's usually about the time that the teams that have failed to reach contention pack it in and sell of their parts for prospects at the trading deadline. As a Mets fan I normally start to lower my expectations and look forward to seeing how well the late-season call-ups from the minors can do. Sometimes there's a moral victory or two to be had, like Dominic Smith finally getting able to play again after an injury and smacking a walk-off home run in the last game of the 2019 season.

Opening Day is always a time for unreasonable hope, when every team is in contention and reality has yet to dash any dreams. I am less concerned this day about my team, however, than in the players and personnel of all the teams being safe. Just as my fears are different this year, so are my hopes. I hope less for a pennant, than for a sign that we can somehow return to life and that our efforts to start opening things with safeguards in place can actually work. (As a teacher, I am particularly vested in this.)

I honestly don't know if trying to have a season in this conditions will work or not. Right now I just need some hope and something positive to look forward to every day, so I will just try to forget about the stakes and enjoy having my daily friend back again. This morning my daughters made little banners for Opening Day, and one of them is growing into a certified baseball nut. I look forward to hot summer days inside watching the games and talking baseball together. I haven't felt this cautiously hopeful in weeks.

Play ball

Baseball Ephemera To Enjoy

This gospel song using baseball as a metaphor for living the good life by Sister Wynona Carr gets my hands clapping every time.

If being a Mets fan means being satisified with moral victories, that Dominic Smith home run to end last season is one of the all-time great moral victories.

I love lame, shoddy baseball cards, and the 1983 Fleer card of Jim Kaat may be the best.

YouTube exists so that people can make a video re-enacting the end of game 6 of the 1986 World Series with Nintendo's RBI Baseball.