Opening Day is baseball's own holiday
Posted: Tuesday, April 08, 2008 9:59 AM
Opening Day is about hope. So how does this great day work in a place where hope is faint?
Taking the pulse of Giants fans at the San Francisco opener Monday reinforced the belief of romantics who see in baseball unending metaphors for life. Every seat was filled. People stood three and four deep along the right-field arcade. They soaked in the sunshine, local favorite garlic fries, an afternoon beer and casual conversation.
The game (won by the Padres, 8-4) was something of a backdrop. The Giants are a weak team and so they have little to offer their devoted fans (eight straight years of over three million in attendance). There are a few young arms that are legitimate and a handful of marginal prospects that are being pushed at the fan base in the hopes that at least one can prove himself a worthy big leaguer.
Bottom line: Only a minor miracle prevents the Giants from a last-place finish in the NL West and the talk surrounding the team in the early going is that of a possible 100-loss season.
Against that background, the home opener was a day of amnesia. For an afternoon, over 42,000 fans (the team’s largest paid home-opener attendance in the last nine years) enjoyed being at a ballgame and the prognosis didn’t matter. I saw a young man from my neighborhood. He is a young professional, who has attended every Giants opener in the new ballpark with his dad. I saw another young man who scooted out of the office to spend a “long” lunch break in the stands with his dad. I talked to some fans that have been to every home opener since the early 1970s. They are realistic about this year’s team, but one said that Opening Day was in essence a holiday.
People wore a little less Giants merchandise and I was struck by how few Barry Bonds jerseys were spotted, but that is expected collateral damage when a team’s fortunes fall.
For tonight’s game the Giants have sold 36,000 tickets. I would be shocked if half that number of fans attends. And unless there is a massive turnaround, that trend likely continues for much of the season.
But Opening Day saw fathers and sons, groups of friends, people sneaking away from work and yes, the dedicated fan, all convene for one afternoon of ritual and celebration. For one day in this San Francisco baseball season, the standings didn’t matter.
FIVE MORE SWINGS
The box scores from Week 1 highlight several stories:
1. The pressure to win every game is as strong as ever. Starting pitching is babied more than ever yet still very fragile. Bullpens are abused. Sunday’s scorecard had 30 teams playing and only four used fewer than three pitchers. Fourteen used at least four pitchers. By June 1, the DL will be standing room only for overworked relievers.
2. The most indispensable player in the NL is Ben Sheets. To contend, the Brewers need Sheets to come up huge for they have no other arm capable of taking the lead role in their rotation. So far, so good as Sheets pitched well at Wrigley Field before blanking the Giants on Sunday.
3. Tigers manager Jim Leyland threatened this in the offseason and he followed through Sunday as veteran 36-year-old catcher Pudge Rodriguez was the leadoff hitter against the White Sox (the move didn’t keep Detroit from falling to 0-6).
4. The Dodgers still seek offense. They have scored 23 runs in their first seven games. The NL West is ruled by pitching, but there’s not enough pop in Los Angeles to remove stress from the pitching staff.
5. The Reds sent to the minors their prime young arm, Homer Bailey, and their best young bat, Jay Bruce, but Cincinnati still caught everyone’s attention in week 1 with the pitching performances of Johnny 22-year-old Johnny Cueto and 24-year-old Edinson Volquez. St. Louis also has stunned with its impressive starting pitching.
