It’s officially the start of baseball season.
Many believe that the season gets underway in the last days of March and the first days of April. Some might even argue that it’s baseball season when pitchers and catchers report to spring training in February. These people are wrong. Well, they may be technically correct, but it’s like an internship: no one really cares until it’s full-time. I would know; I currently do not hold permanent employment. But unlike myself, baseball is now finally full-time.
In the last two days, we’ve seen the NBA and NHL wrap up their seasons, both in similarly anticlimactic fashion: A Miami team getting absolutely run over by a superior team from the West winning their first championship in five games.
The Miami Heat and the Florida Panthers both wildly overachieved as eight seeds by winning their conferences, but the magic just ran out for them. Last night especially was a proverbial kick to the nuts for Cinderella stories, with the Panthers getting blown out by the Vegas Golden Knights, giving up nine goals and losing by six in an elimination game. This coming after Jimmy Butler, Bam Adebayo, and the Heat’s stable of previously obscure role players stopped playing like the ‘96 Bulls, and went back to looking like a team that’s fighting to win the auto-bid for March Madness in a mid-major conference. It’s okay Miami – none of this will matter in a month when you inevitably become a soccer town upon the arrival of a certain small Argentinian man.
With these sports coming to an end, the NFL being in their slowest time of the year with training camp still a month away, and the MLS still being underwhelming (at least until the aforementioned arrival of that little Argentinian), the fan of team sports looks to the MLB to carry them through these dog days. Some people may not love baseball and think it’s too slow (although the pitch clock is the best thing to happen to baseball since steroids), but if you just get into it, it’s the perfect sport for summer.
The games are much more of a casual experience than the other major sports, but on a nice summer day or night, it’s always a good time to go to the ballpark, find a seat that’s way better than the one you paid for, and knock back a couple beverages. It’s not like hockey or basketball, where there’s nonstop action, but it doesn’t need to be. There’s definitely tense moments, especially in the later innings, but baseball provides the ability to take the time between these moments to chill out, enjoy the scene, and get involved in fan shenanigans that you’ll only find among the bleacher creatures who go in knowing they’re going to spend much more money on the night’s booze than their ticket to enter. I love it, and once I figure out how to effectively gamble on it, I’m sure I’ll love it even more (there’s gotta be a strategy given all the advanced stats nerds that work on this sport, right?).
So, while we await the return of our other sports, let’s get into baseball. It’s been carrying the American summer sports scene for over a century, and this year is no different. Happy real opening day, MLB.