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MLB General

The Boys Are Back in Town…

“Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light.” -Dante, on the baseball off-season

“What you have to remember is that a baseball isn’t a week or a month, but a season. And a season is a long time.” -Chuck Tanner

Last year on January 1, I ignored a garden-variety New Year’s Eve hangover in favor of enjoying all-day college football, Bloody Mary’s, and cheese fries with my then-boyfriend and company. He and his buddy started out ordering Irish Car Bombs. Right before downing this asinine drink I still can’t get my head around, Ex says to Idiot Friend: “This drink is arguably the most important drink of the day. How this goes down dictates the rest of the afternoon. Maybe the rest of the year.” While I question my own judgment for dating someone who placed that much stock in a drink I still swear tastes like castor oil, I admittedly thought back on that day, as I evaluated the actual gravity of the first week of baseball season. Exactly how consequential are these beginning games?

I can wave them off as insignificant in the grander scheme of things, but I still almost passed out from excitement when the 4 train pulled up to Yankee Stadium last Sunday. And of course, everyone who’s dangling off the bottom end of his Fantasy League is adopting “There’s still 152 games left!” as their mantra. So how telling are these opening games really?

I may be attributing a little too much emotional dynamic to the sport, but here’s how I see it. It’s like dating someone who moves across the country, and you both agree you can “see other people” while you’re apart. So you have your fun but your heart isn’t in it as much, you’re just in it for the action. But as soon as he or she is back in town, everything slips perfectly and seamlessly back into place. No arguing, no courtesy “catching up” conversations. Just the intense thrill to be back together again.

Football and basketball have been my winter flings, but all bets are off now that Baseball is back in town. (Literally, all bets are off. After a disastrous bracket culminating in a parlayed bet on Michigan, I’m tossing in the towel.) And I’m going to have to grudgingly agree with Ex on this one. The first week of baseball season is indeed the shot of whiskey in Guinness on New Year’s Day. (There’s a sentence I never thought I’d say.)

Despite what felt like artic weather on Opening Day, it was just inordinately refreshing to finally be around 55,000 baseball fans. The Yankees could have been playing the Devil Rays, and I would have been just as elated. But then again, I wouldn’t have gotten a chance to revel in the smattering of loud Boston fans who snuck out of the stadium in the 8th inning, tails between unwelcome legs.

And I realized, nothing had changed in the last 5 months besides for the line-ups. I fell right back into the Bronx swing of things, heckling Boston fans, booing Wells, soaking up the ageless, unrelenting, and interminable Rivalry.

It was like no time had even elapsed.

The thing is, people don’t change. We are who we are. Like Boomer told us after his warm reception in the Bronx, “it is what it is.” Brilliant. He’s just a big, dumb animal, folks. What makes baseball great, among other things, is that it’s not like football. Every football game profoundly affects the season, and the outcome of the game isn’t usually a great surprise. You’re not going to see Titans toppling New England the same way you can watch the Blue Jays pummel the Sox.

It’s a long season, and while we’ll dine on our share of “upsets” and oddities, the fact remains that this first week of the 2005 season may very well be a microcosm of the grander scheme of things. That’s why baseball lends itself so well to Life Metaphors, and that’s why I can’t bring myself to sell out to the “they’re just regular season games” mentality.

Consider what’s happened in the last week, not as isolated games and incidents, but in the context of what we already know about baseball. It’s like Hannibal Lector said, “Everything you need to know is in [the first week of the season], Clarice.”

Take the Mets. I’m choosing my words carefully here, but did anyone really think Pedro and Beltran would turn them around? It’s not like Roy Hobbs rolled up to their dugout.

I mean, I love the Mets, and when they’re not playing the Yankees, I’m all about the Amazins. But if we’ve learned anything from playoff history, it’s that the top teams have their 8th hitter batting .260, or have a fierce pitching trifecta, or drag midgets to their games. Unless Pedro and whatever that dwarf’s name is reconcile, the Mets just don’t have enough bench depth to pull this one off.

(As my sister said to her Mets-cheering boyfriend, “Well, at least they’re getting all the New York sports news coverage! There’s no such thing as bad press, right?”)

The Mets hapless start isn’t the only thing setting the stage for 2005. Yeah, we all knew the Yanks-Sox match-up this past week was going to be electric, and I wanted so badly to just treat it as my metaphorical reunion with a long-distance boyfriend, and ignore that the first game was against the defending champs. It was like finally recovering from mono, so your friends take you out to celebrate the fact you can drink again after 3 months, and they immediately start making you pound Jager shots.

Shouldn’t I be weening into things like this? Like, start me out with a little Yankees-Anaheim series? And then cruise into the Boston games? Good God, I’m sober for 5 long months, and then you start the baseball season with the equivalent of mainlining tequila.

That series meant more than longtime rivals meeting with roles reversed for the first time in 86 years. It meant, in the Big Picture, that nothing’s changed. Not in Yankee Stadium, not in Shea, Fenway, or even outside any of these sacred walls, where politics still rear their thorny head.

It’s all here, all of baseball returned in full force:

–Someone gets nailed by the new steroid policy before the gavel even fell in court. (What did Alex Sanchez do, run home and think “I’ll hide the evidence…in my bloodstream!”? He’s That Guy in high school who gets caught smoking on the field trip right after the long speech the teacher gave at the head of the bus about how the “students’ behavior is a reflection on the school.”)

–Bonds, even on the injured list, still inspires disgust among the media and whirlwind gossip about the eventual future of his stats.

–Rivera blows two saves, and already people are shrieking about his decline. I don’t get it. Boston blows seasons for 86 years, and Rivera loses 2 regular season games, and all of sudden, he’s Josh Beckett? But there it is, the return of Rampant Dismissals of Legendary Talent. Boston continues to be Mo’s kryptonite, and no time was wasted re-establishing this sad truth.

One week of baseball, and the only thing different from last year is the presence of “1918” chants.

It’s been a long winter for the baseball fan, and now here’s our payoff. Game upon game upon game, 30 teams thriving on constant kinetic energy, sports sections packed with box scores, daily roster changes to my fantasy team. Never a dull moment. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s easy to dismiss regular season games as inconsequential, but they’re not. Every game, every pitch, every walk…they mean more than just fantasy points. They’re my bread and butter. It’s a long season, and thankfully so, because every game is a palatable reaffirmation of the subtle and not-so-subtle accessories that define both the sport and its infinitely great texture.

By YankTank

Kris Pollina lives and works in New York City as an advertising copywriter. She lives and dies by NY sports and is the first to admit she can be wildly irrational in defense of her teams. She spends too much time thinking of fantasy team names, too little time reading injury reports. She doesn't understand people who keep score at baseball games. She has more interest in the Kreb Cycle than she does in the NBA, tennis, golf, or anything that is limited to running around a track. She doesn't mind the NFL overtime rules, thinks hockey is wildly underrated, and hates the expression "step up to the plate." Most importantaly, she doesn't believe in wearing baseball hats with football logos on them. Football players wear helmets.

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