Opening Day Is Messed Up

Opening Day in a baseball season should be a national celebration. Heck, it should even be a national holiday. Kids should be off from school to watch the first game either in a stadium or on television. But the schedule has messed things all up. Only twelve teams will have Opening Day with the other eighteen teams waiting for Friday to open the season. What's with that? How can we get Opening Day to be a holiday when not even half of the teams are even playing?

There are two requirements for Opening Day. First, every team should be playing and secondly, every game should be a day game. One of the best parts of Opening Day is looking at that very first, brand-spanking new box score of the season. All those box scores should be available by early evening at the latest. But that's not going to happen because ESPN has to have an evening game to battle the likes of American Idol. And so we'll get the Giants and the Dodgers at 8 P.M. ET and we can listen to the announcers talk about the shadows between the pitcher and the batter for at least three or four innings.

Baseball, in its ultimate wisdom, has decided to open the season in stages. It's like a dogsled race or something.  Twelve teams will actually play on Opening Day. Twenty-two teams will play on Opening Day, Part Two on Friday. But the math isn't right. That's because four of the teams that played on Opening Day, Part One will play again on Opening Day, Part Two. Confused yet? And four of those teams playing on Friday will not start their games until 10:05 P.M. (ET). Ugh!

It won't be until Saturday until all thirty teams are playing the same day. At that point, all thirty dogsleds will have checked into the check point area. This whole deal is poorly constructed.

At least we'll have one thing to be thankful for. At least nobody this year is starting their season in Japan or England or Puerto Rico. That's a plus. The big point here is that Opening Day should be Opening Day. Every team should be in action so that the entire country can celebrate the beginning of the season together. Anything else is like having some people celebrate New Years in China.