The sun rises to meet the blue sky above, casting its light upon a diamond of reddish dirt and fresh cut grass. A white ball pops against the worn, brown leather of the catcher’s mitt. The crack of the bat sounds as an outfielder runs a calculated route underneath a pop fly during warm-ups. Fans slowly enter the park. They grab an ice cold Coca-Cola (certainly not a Pepsi) along with their peanuts and Cracker Jacks as they shuffle through the aisles to find their seats. Baseball’s beginning.
April 4th is the official Opening Day for Major League Baseball, and the sights and smells of baseball will permeate the early April air.
There is something about Opening Day that captures my imagination. Despite the politics of overpaid athletes and the taint of steroid use among a myriad of other ethically questionable dimension of the game, I still find baseball compelling.
After a long winter, baseball marks the beginning of spring. Despite what happened the year before, the slates are clean. Every team is situated at a pristine win-lose record of 0-0. Individual players, whether they struggled to meet or surpass expectations last season, have a clean slate from which to start all over again.
Through April into May into June and on into October, baseball happens. The early victories will lead some fans to a premature jubilation, while other fans will know that they need to hunker down for the long haul. By the deep heat of summer nights, a few teams will emerge, wrestling for the opportunity to play in October. Ultimately, only one team will win in the end, and baseball will leave us as quickly as it came.
As former Major League Baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti explains, “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.”
There are many things that teach us about the cycles of life, but baseball does so in such a stupefyingly poignant way. We are talking about a game played with a stick and a ball, and yet we are talking about redemption and rebirth. As John Forgerty sings, “I’m born again, there’s new grass on the field.”
It does not matter what happened the year before or the year before that. Opening Day is the first day of new life — a new season. Players on the brink of retirement may hit new strides, rookies are learning to hit first strides, and other players are looking to return to stride.
In the past month, teams have been forming their identities, and players have been honing their skills for the upcoming season. Coaches have been strategizing and forming that perfect Opening Day line-up. Fans have been dusting off their jerseys, and planning their first visit to the ballpark where they can cheer on their favorite players. They can watch in an enraptured trance, hoping, pining, longing to see their player slide in safe at home.
In some ways, I like to think of every Sunday morning as Opening Day. I cannot control what happened the week prior because it is done and gone. Whatever my record was cannot be undone. If I failed, I hope I did so in style. But while it remains fixated in the bowels of history, God seems to suggest that it’s Opening Day for the week ahead. For in that week ahead, I am sitting pretty at a pristine 0-0.