Time Begins
And the clock is ticking towards elimination…
Tom Boswell, in his classic 1985 volume “Why Time Begins on Opening Day,” wrote that the game “is diffracted by the town and ballpark where it is played... Does baseball, like a liquid, take the shape of its container?”
Sure enough, every major league city celebrates the new season in its own distinct way. I’m not sure about last night’s 73 kayaks, but as we’ll see, that became just part of a much bigger discussion.
Bill Veeck famously said there is only winter and baseball, while George V Higgins wrote that Opening Day serves to “beat back the forces of darkness and the National Football League.”
And really, to seal the emergence of the world into light, every team should play on Opening Day and yes, it should be a national holiday, rather than spread over three days. (Read Extra Innings on memories of the Toronto Blue Jays as they start their 50th season on Friday.)
Two teams played last night – and one of them wasn’t Cincinnati, much to the chagrin of folks in the Queen city who, quite understandably, believe that if history matters, the descendants of the nation’s first professional club should have symbolic pride of place in opening the season.
The Yankees comfortably beat the Giants out on the west coast (in what was apparently the Bombers’ first Opening Day shutout on the road since 1967), but it sounded like the big loser was Netflix, as the Tyson-Paul network tried to make Opening “Night” a thing despite blackouts, streaming issues and even their score bug. The social media team will likely have a busy morning.
Tony Maglio at The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Netflix is “Messing With the Wrong Fans”.
“While Netflix’s involvement in baseball no doubt raises the profile and potential reach of the game on a national and international basis, and those are positives, the streamer’s habit of making a glitzy spectacle out of things may not work so well here. For football it was all pretty OK, save the dumb Santa Claus coats with a giant Netflix logo. The NFL, like Netflix, sells itself.
“But diehard supporters of what is still technically America’s pastime — baseball, not football, which is the game we actually prefer — generally want a naturalistic presentation of the sport steeped in tradition on par perhaps only with golf. The sights and sounds baseball fans seek each March are not Netflix’s “Tudum” screen. Netflix does a lot of things exceedingly well, hence its dominant position in the marketplace, but the tech company and industry disruptor doesn’t really do tradition.”
Sam Neumann writes at Awful Announcing that the debut broadcast was “promising, excessive and occasionally a disaster.”
“Netflix treated the hour before first pitch less like a baseball broadcast and more like a very expensive promotional vehicle for its own content library… The reaction from the San Francisco crowd, which had not come to a baseball game to watch WWE programming, was somewhere between confused and indifferent.”
Since we’re talking – as is inevitable if not compulsory on Opening Day – about tradition and history, the Netflix broadcast actually managed to miss MLB’s first-ever ABS challenge, distracted by a dugout manager interview. In the fourth inning, Yankee shortstop José Caballero challenged a strike call on a pitch from Logan Webb and lost the appeal – the new ball-strike system confirming veteran umpire Bill Miller’s initial ruling.
As we thought, it’s going to be interesting to watch how the system beds in. At least one former umpire isn’t sold. Richie Garcia is worried about the impact “robot” umpires will have on their human counterparts. He told the AP:
“I think it’s embarrassing, embarrassing to the umpires that are calling the game. Nobody likes to be humiliated in front of 30,000, 40,000 people,” said Garcia, a major league umpire from 1975 to 1999.
“What Major League Baseball is saying is: I don’t trust the umpire’s strike zone, so I’m going to use something that’s going to be operated by some computer geek that knows nothing about baseball, and he’s the one that’s going to measure this and measure that because he’s got a Ph.D. in physics or whatever the hell he’s got a degree in.”
Anyway, Netflix doesn’t have another game for a while. NBC is on deck today – for the first time in over a quarter-century – with two promising match-ups, in New York and Los Angeles (that would, of course, be at somewhere that’s now called Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium).
It’s no accident that teams usually have a day off straight after opening day, allowing pundits, prognosticators – and, of course, oddsmakers – to extrapolate, naturally, how the whole season will go based on the first nine innings.
ESPN’s is here, with their writers predicting the Dodgers will become the “first three-peat World Series champions since the Yankees won three in a row in 1998-2000.”
The Athletic’s latest power ranking of all 30 teams is here.
CBS Sports’ predictions are here, along with odds for each performance category in both leagues.
Meanwhile, Philip Bump has some interesting Opening Day data here, with big news for fans of the New York Mets.
With last night’s Netflix experience and last week’s story about MLB’s new partnership with Polymarket illustrating how the game has changed, don’t despair.
If we’re nostalgic for baseball of old, and who isn’t, there’s always the chance to relive vintage games, or at least “anonymised” game situations – and bet on them – with DK Replay from Draft Kings.
Sometimes it feels like the world has been on hold for months. Except, of course, it hasn’t.
This time last year, I wrote:
“Ask any baseball fan on Opening Day and they’ll express some variant of the same sentiment: that it’s hard to imagine the country needing the national pastime more than it does right now.”
But after today, and especially building on the joyous World Baseball Classic, which proved, at least for everyone but Mark DeRosa, a perfect appetizer for the season, there’s always that optimistic promise that everything that’s good will prevail and somehow – somehow – we’ll “get ‘em tomorrow.”
Even as a Cubs fan, I can smile at this. This one’s for you, Jerry!
See Also:
Challenging The System (From September 2025)
Which Pastime, Exactly? (From November 2025)
The Pope And Nellie Fox (From November 2025)
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Game Notes w/e 25 March
Friday, 20 March; Johns Hopkins vs Wesleyan, Babb Field, Baltimore MD.
The Blue Jays’ William Moell pitches to Wesleyan shortstop and leadoff man Tucker DeWolf in the first inning of what was my first in-person contest of this season. The at-bat resulted in a walk, with DeWolf then picked off at second.
Something of a gloomy day up at Homewood, but the gloom mostly descended on the visiting Cardinals as Hopkins dominated the day’s second game to sweep the double header.
This is Hopkins’ first season under head coach Nate Mulberg, who took over from long-serving skipper Bob Babb – he of the field name – last summer. If you missed it, there’s a great WYPR interview with Coach Babb here.
Sunday, 22 March; Baltimore Orioles vs Washington Nationals, Camden Yards, Baltimore MD.
A pair of back-to-back dress rehearsals for players and stadium staff ahead of this week’s Opening Days. In the first game at Camden Yards, even a bullpen strike-zone frame couldn’t help the Nats pitchers as the O’s rode a solid outing by Kyle Bradish and three home runs to an 8-1 win.
First baseman Pete Alonso and the new Orioles’ scoreboard both come well-hyped. Maybe the addition of the Polar Bear might entice John Oliver to bring his son out to Camden Yards.
Monday 23 March; Washington Nationals vs Baltimore Orioles, Nationals Park, Washington DC.
In the sparsely-attended second game (yes, play is actually in progress in that pic), and the final spring training outing for both teams, the O’s ran out 2-0 winners as Shane Baz and Chris Bassitt combined for seven scoreless innings.
So once again, possibly contrasting/challenging seasons ahead for the Beltway rivals, who finished last season at 75-87 for the O’s and 66-96 for the Nats. For the first time since the Nats arrived in DC in 2005, both teams will be guided by first-year managers.
Although the Nats ended the Spring with a marginally better record, you’d have to say objectively that Craig Albernaz probably has some better tools in his bag. Let’s see what he can build with them.
I’ll be back at Camden later today – first and foremost to celebrate the return of baseball – but also to see how the latest chapter in the O’s pursuit of the post-season might unfold.
See Also:
Wings, Clipped (From May 2025)
You can read Game Notes from previous seasons here.
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As always, thanks for reading. During the regular season I aim to write a baseball-related post midweek and then a politics wrap at weekends. I’ll try my best to keep them separate but as you might expect, one has been way more sane than the other, especially at this confusing and crucial moment.
There’s a full States of Play archive here.
If you think you might like to take part in a simple Q&A for the project, reflecting on your memories of baseball and politics; along with where you think the country stands right now and where it might be headed, I’d love to hear from you, and you can email me at steve@statesofplayproject.com.
You can see the ones I’ve done over previous seasons here.
Here’s how it works:
You send me a brief bio – a few paragraphs telling me who you are, what you do, why you love baseball – as well as a couple of pics of yourself, ideally at a ballgame, and in return I send you nine questions, one per inning. You take as long as you like to email your answers back, then I’ll make sure you’re happy with the final draft before it’s published.
The first two questions are always the same for every participant: what was the first ballgame you went to and what do you remember about it? And then, what was the first election you voted in and what do you think have been the most significant changes in our politics since then?
I’ll round out the other seven questions based on your interests and what you tell me in the bio, as well as anything else you might like to talk about. It’ll finish up with where you think things might be headed.
Sound good? I look forward to hearing from you and hopefully see you at a ballgame.
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