Opening Night — Baseball Bench Coach

Six years ago one of my daughters and I experienced the perfect “Opening Day”. We were invited to Cincinnati to see the Reds open the season against the Cardinals. I remember walking around downtown that morning with anticipation off the charts for the new season to begin. We watched the now 100-year old Findlay Market parade from the Fountain Square platform, walked across the overpass to Great American Ballpark, and settled into seats along the third base side for a wonderful afternoon of pre-game festivities and baseball. While it’s difficult to match that moment, I always get a feeling of rebirth each year on Opening Day. As I begin this blog post, it is Thursday afternoon a couple hours before the 2020 MLB season is to begin with back to back night games featuring the Yankees vs. Nationals and Giants vs. Dodgers. While I look forward to this 60-game season ahead of us, I must admit that I don’t have my usual enthusiasm. It’s simply “Opening Night”.

Opening Day has always been a special holiday for me. Because the Reds were the first official professional baseball team, MLB started every season with an afternoon game in Cincinnati for decades. To this day the Reds remain the only MLB team to open every season with a scheduled, home game. The Cubs have been the opponents in a record 36 of those games. I’ve attended two other home openers in my lifetime, my first one in seventh grade when somehow many kids and I were struck suddenly with a mysterious illness and could not attend school. The year before I was at home watching the game on my family’s first color television set (see “Opening Day”, 04/01/2019). A special moment was in ninth grade when my class gathered around a television our teacher brought into the classroom so that we could all watch Henry Aaron hit his 714th career home run, tying Babe Ruth, as Hank’s Braves hammered the Reds. The sanctity of the afternoon home openers began to dissipate in 1994, when ESPN started televising a regular season game the night before Opening Day.

This 2020 Opening Night provides us with some history-making teams. Let’s start with the nightcap, another edition of the Giants vs. Dodgers longtime rivalry. The match-up goes back to 1890 when the New York Giants faced off against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Both teams moved west in the late 1950s and brought the conflict to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Last year the teams played their 2,500th game with the Giants now leading the series 1,258 to 1,235 (updated through Sunday’s game). There have been so many controversial games and pennant races along the way, and certainly the one that stands out is the battle for the 1951 NL flag. The Dodgers held a 13 ½ game lead in August, but the Giants charged back behind their rookie centerfielder, Willie Mays. The teams ended in a tie for first place and played a 3-game tiebreaker series. The Giants won the deciding game behind Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard Around the World”. It was one of 23 NL championships the Giants have won; the Dodgers are tied with them for the National League lead.

The Giants vs. Dodgers rivalry is one of great disdain between the organizations, the fans, and the players. Two of the greatest players ever in an MLB uniform refused to switch to the other side. After the 1956 season the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson was traded to the Giants but retired instead. In 1972, the Giants tried to trade Willie Mays to LA but Mays interceded and became a New York Met. My early memory of the teams centered on their ace pitchers, righthander Juan Marichal, known for his high leg kick and intimidation, and lefty Sandy Koufax, whose dominance of baseball from 1961-1966 is unquestioned. In an era where #1s commonly pitched against #1s, Marichal and Koufax never faced off on Opening Day, and actually only met head to head on five occasions. They each won two of the encounters, while Koufax lost the fifth game and Marichal got a no-decision. Koufax did pitch one of his four no-hitters against Marichal.

On Opening Night 2020 I was looking forward to seeing Marichal-Koufax like images on the mound as Giants righty Johnny Cueto and his own unorthodox windup, was set to face Clayton Kershaw, the second greatest Dodger lefty of all time. Unfortunately, in what might be a signal of things to come, Kershaw was scratched from the start due to injury. Cueto had a strong start, one run in four innings, but his abbreviated outing is also telling of what to expect this season. The Dodgers hit the Giants bullpen hard and posted an 8-1 victory.

Getting the nod to pitch your team’s opener is a huge honor. I love looking at the pitching matchups on Opening Day. There was none better than in the first game of Opening Night, featuring the Yankees’ ace, Gerrit Cole, against the Nationals’ Max Scherzer, a 3-time Cy Young winner. Bill James, noted baseball historian, ranks the top active MLB starters in this order: Cole; Verlander; Scherzer; deGrom; and Strasburg. The New York and Washington batting lineups knew that any scoring opportunity would be important to take advantage of on Opening Night.

The first MLB game of the season, won by the Yankees 4-1, in a rain-shortened affair, was indeed a pitching duel. Cole threw a one-hitter, while Scherzer had 11 strikeouts in his 16 recorded outs. Giancarlo Stanton though got the best of Mad Max, a 3-RBI game complete with an HR estimated at 459 feet. The game matched two teams on distinct sides of the winning baseball spectrum. The Yankees come into the season looking for their 28th World Series title, unmatched by any team in the game. The Pinstripes’ last title though was in 2009, a drought by their standards, but certainly one that Red Sox and Cubs fans might chuckle about.

The Nationals of course are baseball’s defending champs. It seems like a lot more than nine months ago when Washington defeated the Astros in the classic, 7-game Series last fall, capturing the franchise’s first World Series title. The Nationals franchise was founded in 1969 as the Montreal Expos in an MLB expansion. The current Nationals are actually the eighth MLB team in history to call Washington, D.C their home. With D.C. as a home for MLB baseball, we have witnessed several American presidents throw out the ceremonial first pitch of the season. Yet, the last U.S. president to deliver an Opening Day ceremonial throw was Bill Clinton. I had to smile at the beginning of the Opening Night broadcast when Dr. Fauci, a former Yankee follower but now a Nats fan sporting a World Series Champions face mask, delivered the first pitch, a socially distanced ball away from the strike zone.

One of the other interesting pieces of Nationals history is that their predecessor, the Montreal Expos, were principal factors in mini-seasons like this one. The Expos won their only MLB division title in strike-shortened 1981, but lost the NLCS to the Dodgers. Then in 1994, the season we didn’t complete due to a player strike, the Expos had the best record in baseball before MLB shut it down. (See “Shortened Season”, 06/08/2020.) And sadly in 2020, for the first time since the Expos took the field in their inaugural 1969 season, we won’t have MLB baseball in Canada. Our northern neighbors have prohibited the Blue Jays from playing this year in Toronto. After looking at other MLB ballparks for its 2020 home, including being turned down by the State of Pennsylvania to play at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park, the Blue Jays have settled on their AAA-site, Buffalo, as home base this year.

As I sat on my comfy couch during Opening Night, I kept looking at all those empty seats at Nationals Park and Dodger Stadium. Although I admit I did chuckle at the cardboard cutouts of fans in LA, the attempt to create a baseball atmosphere with no fans is quite sad to me. I used to love going to ballparks years ago and hearing the scalpers tout that they have the “best seats in the house”. That practice has been replaced for the most part by those apps we now love on our iPhones, StubHub and SeatGeek, and their preference drop down, “best available”. For now, on this empty Opening Night, best available means my couch. Okay, grudgingly, let the games begin!

Until next Monday,

your Baseball Bench Coach