No sport defines the calendar like the major league baseball season. For generations fans have known the season starts in early spring and ends with the falling leaves in October. There’s a comfort to realizing big league baseball season has pretty much been this way forever and some of the game’s great traditions like opening day are ageless.
The Twins and all major league teams begin play next week. The charm of opening day ranks with baseball’s most special events like spring training, the All-Star game and World Series. Opening day, though, comes to every major league town every year and that makes it unique among baseball’s great moments.
The Twins’ season and home opener is Monday at the Metrodome against the Los Angeles Angels. This is the earliest home opener in Twins’ history and matches the March 31 road opener at Detroit in 2003.
Here are a dozen things to love about opening day:
Trivia talk: Stump your friends if you know stuff like this will be the Twins’ first opener ever against the Angels. The most starts by a Twins’ opening day pitcher? Brad Radke with eight openers.
Build up: Anticipation for the opener builds like a kid waiting for Santa Claus. By the late innings you may be disappointed with the score, but it sure was fun looking forward to the opening game.
Truancy: Go ahead and admit it. As a kid you skipped school and later as an adult blew off work to watch the opening game. Keep the excuses to yourself.
Newcomers: There are new faces to be seen at each opener. Curious Twins fans look forward to evaluating center fielder Carlos Gomez, left fielder Delmon Young, third baseman Mike Lamb, shortstop Adam Everett, second baseman Brendan Harris and pitchers Livan Hernandez and Nick Blackburn.
Worth the adulation: Joe Mauer, Michael Cuddyer, Justin Morneau and Joe Nathan are admirable heroes on and off the field. And with their long term contracts you can cheer them in the new ballpark.
Cynicism proof: Even the skeptical media and your grouchy friends are carried away by the jubilation of opening day. Okay, maybe a couple of negative types hold out, but not many more than on Christmas.
Openers past and future: Go ahead and day dream about 2010 in the new ballpark. If you’re old enough, recall the 1962 home opener when snow surrounded the outfield fence and less than 15,000 showed up on a chilly April day at Met Stadium.
Burst into song: Singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh inning is just like belting out “Happy Birthday to You” at a party. Everybody joins in and nobody cares if you sound like a sick cow.
Storytelling: Former Twins’ radio announcer Halsey Hall once set the press box on fire with his cigar ashes. Willie Mays came through here in 1951 and was hitting .477 before the New York Giants called him up to the big leagues. Go ahead and tell a few baseball stories of your own.
Argue and debate: It’s great fun to argue and debate about baseball players and issues while driving to and from the game, and while watching the opener. Just to get things rolling, argue with a buddy about where the Twins will finish, the starting pitching, whether Mauer should move from catcher to another position and the impact of steroids on baseball.
People watching: Count how many celebs you see on opening day that are AWOL the balance of the season. Go easy on them, though. Opening day is special and it’s even for casual fans.
Real bats: On a lot of baseball diamonds you have to put with the gawd awful sound of the ball making contact with an aluminum bat. Not in the majors, the bats are wooden and the tradition continues.