Opening Day

 It was 28 degrees when I took the new pup outside to do her business this morning, but that's OK. Because it's Opening Day in baseball, or just opening day.

It's also April Fool's Day, which means it is totally acceptable to believe my cruddy Pittsburgh Pirates are going to experience a joyous resurrection (this being Holy Week as well) and win, I don't know, 60 games.

April Fool's! The Cruds are only going to win 50 or so, and we all know it.

As to everything else, this is the official-official first day of spring for a bunch of congregants, the average age of which creeps upward every year. This is a major concern for baseball, which long ago lost its mantle as the National Pastime to the Megalomart NFL. The former is too slow and too anticipatory and too obsessed with alphabet-soup minutiae to appeal to a generation raised on Call of Duty and instant gratification. 

WAR? WHIP? BABIP? WTHC? (Who The Hell Cares?) 

Little wonder that baseball's demographic skews heavily toward the AARP (another acronym!) these days. Little wonder, too, that Opening Day is a non-descript Thursday this year instead of, say, a Sunday or Monday -- because if Opening Day was one of those more traditional days of the week, it would get buried by Final Four coverage.

Truth is, baseball is a pastoral sport rendered more pastoral than it was ever intended to be, which means it is as out of touch with its times as it has ever been. The games, especially those interminable Red Sox-Yankees sagas, plod along for hours and hours. If a batter isn't going yard, he's going yawn by striking out. Moving a runner along with a well-placed bunt is a lost art, because bunting itself is a lost art.

And, yes, I am proving my hypothesis about baseball's demographic by sounding like the archetypal shaking-his-liver-spotted-fist geezer. .

And yet ...

And yet: Opening Day.

Which calls up all sorts of trace memories, because for all its modern-day faults baseball traffics in trace memories like no other American game. With rare exceptions, the details of Super Bowls fade from memory almost immediately,  and they are not sensory things. Baseball is.

And so for me, Opening Day will always be a raw gray day in Wrigley Field when Lake Michigan roared and the wind off it carried snow on its breath. It will be a rain-soaked day in Jacobs Field in Cleveland that stretched long into a well-lubricated night in the city's watering holes. 

It will be those yearly trips to Cincinnati, which for years traditionally christened Opening Day as the lone game on the schedule. This was 40 years ago, during my Anderson days, and I always hitched a ride with a wonderful old character named Clarence Young, who was the sports editor of the newspaper in Elwood. One year it snowed the night before the game, and a photo went out on the wires of San Diego pitcher Randy Jones building a snowman in the visiting dugout. 

Another year, the Reds hosted the Cubs on Opening Day right after the Cubs swung that deal for all those Phillies, and I got yelled at by Larry Bowa for asking a question about his leadership skills instead of his skills at shortstop. 

It wasn't as mortifying as you might think for a young sportswriter. It was more like: Wow! I got yelled at by LARRY BOWA!

I suppose today I'd only get yelled at by some ballclub flack for groaning too loudly in the pressbox as some Opening Day slogfest dragged on and on ... and on.

Sigh.