Basketball begins in winter shadows, out of sight and behind closed doors. It emerges on the other side of the calendar, in a different year than it began. Baseball arrives from weeks of stretching awake, strolling north along with the welcome sun to shirtless days and shorter nights. Football bursts out of sweltering, painful, summer camps, already limping. Football counts its wounded in urgent, weekly wars, with ambulances parked at an open gate.
Baseball fits its seasons. It is a witness to birth, a companion to growth, an escort to harvest. Baseball begins with a promise, with a hint of the possible that is undefined by winning or by losing. All Opening Days celebrate a welcomed beginning, and nothing that happens on any Opening Day can diminish nor exaggerate what is to follow.
A first-game football loss can panic a team, upset strategies, jumble game plans, terminally sour the rare optimistic coach. A football season can be held in one hand, and each piece that falls is loudly obvious. The best baseball teams are going to lose a third of the games they play. Losing is an accepted occurrence and not an artificial calamity. A baseball season is a tapestry, each game a panel, each inning a thread.
Basketball packs all of its excellence into its finish, in games as well as seasons. Just as only the last few minutes matter in a basketball game, so do only the playoffs matter to the season. A baseball game can be won in the first inning, but a basketball game cannot be won until the fourth quarter. A pennant can be lost in April as well as in September, wildcards and playoffs are still arrived at more in moderation than in madness.
Baseball comes without slashes, without hyphens or Roman numerals, no 2001-2002 season, no World Series Finals. Baseball is played as our lives are lived, within the same year, needing only one diary to contain a season's memories. Hockey requires refrigeration and a dentist on staff. No matter how marvelous and slippery may be hockey's skills, they may as well be pantomime until the red light goes on. Most hockey fights, I am convinced, start over arguments of whether anyone can see the puck.
The baseball, which is the same diameter and lighter than a hockey puck, is the perfect size, easily followed and always beginning in the same place. The dimensions of a baseball field are perfectly drawn, exact and yet endless, not an inch too few nor a step too many, from pitcher to catcher, from home to first, from here to infinity. The shortest hit may be as vital as the longest smash.
There are no coin flips, no face-offs, no jump balls in baseball. The baseball is not made to take funny bounces, but it can be encouraged to dip and to delude. The first pitch of the year, as will the last, leaves the pitcher's hand before anything can happen. And nothing might, usually nothing does.
Baseball is anticipation. On Opening Day, baseball's possibilities are their most exponential. Nothing is impossible, including the fair and fitting fact that, until the home team gets at least as many chances as the visitors. Opening Day could last forever.
By Bernie Lincicome
Deseret News, March 31, 2002
Let's play ball!
