Take Me Out To The Ballgame

Image by Chicago Man via Flickr

This past week featured one of my favorite days of each and every year, Opening Day. There is no better moment in professional sports than Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season. On Opening Day, the Kansas City Royals are in first place, along with every other team in baseball. The Baltimore Orioles look like they could be world beaters on Opening Day. All the great and storied franchises, the Cubs, the Red Sox, the Dodgers, they all seem to be ready to make a turn and become champions again when Opening Day comes around.

The day after Opening Day is usually the moment when fans begin to turn on their teams. You suddenly hear that “these guys are bums” or “we suck”. There are no fans as fickle with praise as those that live and die with every win or loss of the 162-game Major League Baseball season. Baseball fans are the most loyal fans that I’ve ever come across, yet they are also the most critical of the teams that they love. They are the only fans that I know of that will cheer on a team through decades-long losing streaks, calling them “bums” and “losers”, but will defend them and their players to their dying breath against a fan of the opposition.

Baseball is a game that inspires poetry. It is a game that inspires love. It is a game that inspires greatness.

Now, with 4 days of games behind us, and with many more days of games ahead, allow me to use the inspiration of the game I love to discuss a few things that I learned over the first weekend of this new baseball season.

• The Kansas City Royals are going to be exciting to watch.

The Royals are not expected to contend in the American League Central, and I don’t think that they will, but they are going to be a fun and exciting team to watch throughout this season, mostly due to some talented young hitters and some extremely untalented pitching. This team has the potential to score 10 runs any night that they take the field. Unfortunately for them, they also have the potential to give up 15. Other than the rock-solid Joakim Soria at the closer position, this pitching staff is beyond suspect. Soria is great, one of the best in the game, but somebody has to get him the ball with him still having the lead for him to truly be effective. Still, with Kila Ka’aihue, a, hopefully, resurgent Alex Gordon, and a farm system that is considered the best in all of baseball, this team has the potential to play the role of spoiler a few times this year, as they build to an impressive run in the future.

If you are truly interested in the Royals, I would strongly recommend checking out the superb Kings of Kauffman blog. In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that my ex-roommate is the lead writer for that site.

• The Red Sox will be better than their opening series.

Boston looked bad in their opening 3 game tilt against the defending AL-Champion Texas Rangers. I mean, bad! But, the fact of the matter is that they aren’t a bad team. Just looking at that roster on paper you can see that there is no way that they are as bad as they looked in that opening series. Carl Crawford, Adrian Gonzalez, Jon Lester, and Dustin Pedroia alone would make a team look like a contender, and that isn’t even scratching the surface about how good this roster is. There are a lot of knee-jerk reactions to slow or fast starts in sports, so I would ask everybody to take a deep breath and talk to me again about how bad the Red Sox look at the All-Star Break.

• The Orioles won’t be as good as their opening series.

See above and apply the reverse version of the logic to the Baltimore Orioles.

• The Chicago Cubs aren’t as bad as I thought they would be.

I am a die-hard Cubs fan. I’ve lived and died with this team since I was 6 years old. Ryne Sandberg was my first hero. Over the course of my life, I have had my heart-broken by this team on many occasions. Consider this, when I was born, in 1979, this team hadn’t won a World Series in 70 years. Now, 32 years later, they haven’t even made it to a World Series in my lifetime. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think they have a snowball’s chance in hell of making it to the World Series this year. However, before last Friday, I thought this team was going to be horrific. Now, after their 1-2 start, I actually have hope that this team may hover around .500 or better for the year. With a young middle infield of Darwin Barney and the emerging superstar, Starlin Castro, as well as a good rotation and bullpen, I feel that this team is building towards a nice year this year and something special next.

But what do I know? I’m a baseball fan. We’re all eternal optimists in April. Ask me how optimistic I am in September.