Play Ball!
“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in 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.”
~A. Bartlett Giamatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind,” Yale Alumni Magazine, November 1977
I always count Opening Day of the baseball season as the first game played at Fenway Park. It doesn’t matter if the team has been playing since March 26. Only when they hit the field at home does the real baseball season begin.
Opening Day is when the score card doesn’t matter, when the race has not yet begun, when every player could be an All-Star, when in the words of Kevin Garnett “Anything is Possible!
It is the proverbial whole new ballgame.
The hopes and dreams for the season ahead are palpable as the beauty of baseball can be experienced in just that one game.
Little kids with huge baseball mitts hoping to catch a baseball in the bleachers.
Grandparents explaining the finer points of a triple play to their kiddos.
Every blade of grass on the field stands in anticipation.
Uniforms are perfect.
No injury reports, no fretting over whether this one game matters.
What does matter is why we love baseball to begin with- seven innings to get it right, and if not, then there is always tomorrow, we will get ‘em next time, or, of course, better luck next year.
Baseball fans, and especially Red Sox fans, are perennial pessimistic optimists, or optimistic pessimists, depending upon the score.
“Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good, too.”
~Yogi Berra
Sure, as with every Opening Day, the 126th season for the Boston Red Sox and their 115th season at Fenway Park, will be packed with a lot! of festivities, marketing, and hoopla- from fly overs to tear-jerker moments, but once the first pitch is thrown, a new season of hope, and hopefully NO heartbreak, begins.
We are Red Sox fans after all, so we don’t go over the moon with expectation, but secretly…we all see extra innings, walk-off homers, and of course, October Baseball in our futures.
Play Ball!
“A good friend of mine used to say, ‘This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.’ Think about that for a while.”
~(Bull Durham)
#openingday
#playball
#BostonRedSox
#FenwayPark
#fieldofdreams