News Editor
No offense to Christmas, but opening day in Major League baseball is the most wonderful time of the year. Well, for me, anyway. With the beginning of the baseball season comes spring, school ending, flowers blooming, ice cream stands, and longer days.
No matter how bad your team was the year before, each and every true baseball fan enters that first pitch thinking, "hmm...could we contend this year?" Come on, you know you do it! But that's the beauty of baseball, the sheer sense of hope which is accompanied by each team and their fans as training camp comes to an end.
Unlike basketball, hockey and even football for that matter, baseball is a sport which is special in so many ways. For starters, baseball is pastoral, it's 19th-century America, it's old-fashioned, but yet evolving in both talent and philosophy by the minute. Baseball establishes a link between us and our forefathers. Baseball is the universal sports language throughout the American culture.
I'll tell you what, hearing about Johnny Bench and Carl Yastremski from your father, learning about Joe Dimaggio from your grandfather, and hearing tales of Honus Wagner and Babe Ruth from your great-grandfather establishes a very special bond between a father and a son that no other sport can claim.
One day, when I'm good and ready, I hope to tell my kids tales of the "great David Ortiz, Pedro Martinez, the bloody sock, Derek Jeter, Ken Griffey JR," and the list goes on.
That, my friends, is why baseball is the purest, most beautiful sport known to man. Baseball truly is a kids game. Grown-ups just screw it up.
Play ball, and God Bless, my fellow baseball fans.
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