If you love baseball, I don’t know if there is a more wonderful day of the year than Opening Day.
It’s the end of winter, the beginning of spring with summer on the way. I have been a baseball fan for nearly 70 years and I realized when I thought about it today that I have only attended a major league game on the first day of the season once.
The two years I covered the Dodgers in the early 1990s were ones in which they opened on the road both times. I saw the home openers, but not the actual openers.
No, the one actual Opening Day game I saw was on April 3, 1984, at Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium.
I was working for the Anderson Independent-Mail in northwestern South Carolina. We didn’t cover the Braves regularly, but Opening Day was a big enough deal that it was work a day of work and the 200-mile round trip.
It was a night game after a rainy day, and as often happens in baseball, something special happened. Future Hall of Fame pitcher Steve Carlton pitched a shutout for Philadelphia for his 301st career victory. He was 39 years old and 1984 would be his last season as an above-average pitcher.
I would see him pitch once more in a preseason exhibition game in 1988 at Denver’s Mile High Stadium. He was trying to catch on for one last season with the Minnesota Twins, but he clearly didn’t have it anymore.
I did see some very interesting things early in the season. In 1994, I saw Atlanta’s Kent Mercker pitch a no-hitter against the Dodgers on April 8th. It was the first Dodger game I ever took my son Virgile to. We had actually gone to an Angels game — the second game of the season — the year before.
Yesterday was Opening Day 2024, though, and I spent a couple of hours doing something I hardly ever do anymore — watching sports on television. Actually the only sport I watch is baseball, but I watched part of the Nationals’ game in Cincinnati and the Dodgers’ home game with San Diego.
Watching the Dodgers play in Dodger Stadium was always special to me, comparable only to watching the Denver Broncos play football at old Mile High Stadium. I saw my first Dodger game in 1978 and my last in 2010 with nearly 200 games in between.
Covering the Dodgers in 1990 and 1991 was as big a challenge as I ever had as a journalist. Back then, night games started at 7:35 p.m. and most games took close to three hours to complete. I used to joke that I couldn’t sign or dance, but I could write a 500-word game story from scratch in 15 minutes and have it read well.
I won’t say I was the fastest ever on deadline, but I will say I never met anyone faster. Essentially, I was one helluva two-finger typist.
But it was so wonderful just to know that night after night all summer long for two years, I had the opportunity to see ballgames.. One thing I have said for many years is that other than family and friends, there is nothing in the world I love more than baseball. That was true when I was a kid, a teenager, an adult and now an old coot.
I’ll close this love letter to opening day with a great old quote from a Hall of Famer.
