Happy Opening Day (Sort Of) - Baseball Is Back!
The Dodgers and the Padres are currently playing in Seoul, officially getting the 2024 MLB Season underway...
Baseball is back!
Well, kind of.
The 2024 MLB regular season is now officially underway with the LA Dodgers and the San Diego Padres currently playing a two-game series in Seoul, South Korea.
However, you can be forgiven for not really thinking or feeling that it is Opening Day or that baseball is back. There’s a few reasons for this:
The two games in Seoul are being played stupidly early in the morning. Like, really, really, really early.
Once the Dodgers and the Padres wrap up, we’re then back to spring training games in Florida and Arizona.
Oh, and Opening Day in baseball is so special because it is actually treated like a flagship day where all 30 teams are in action. This isn’t it.
On that latter point, we’re still going to get an official Opening Day next week, when 24 of the 30 MLB franchises will play. However, something just doesn’t feel right about starting the regular season with two standalone games in another country when spring training is still going on.
I’m going to get deeper into the weeds on this point in a separate post later, but I don’t agree with MLB opening the 2024 season in Seoul. I’m all for growing the game all over the world, and the concept itself is great, but I strongly feel that this two-game set should have been played later in the season. Would it not have been better to have had this event in, say, August when the season is in a groove and nothing else is really going on sports wise? We aren’t really in our baseball stride yet. I mean, again, spring training is literally still going on, plus the country is getting ready to flop on the couch and consume March Madness all week, so I’m not sure as many eyeballs will be on the Seoul Series as maybe there would be in the dog days of summer. I dunno, maybe that’s just me.
Furthermore, and you can call me a baseball purist all you want, but Opening Day should be seen as a sacred event in the sporting calendar that should never be touched. Period. Something just feels a little weird about two regular season games being played an entire week before the rest of baseball get their respective campaigns underway. It feels a little clunky, if I’m being honest.
Although, I will say there is something nice and comforting about watching regular season baseball with a couple of cups of hot, steaming coffee. I could get used to that.
And, look, these two games the Dodgers and the Padres are playing actually count, so that’s something to celebrate.
After all, we’ve reached the point of spring training where the games are boring slogs, so it has been nice to watch a game of baseball that actually means something while writing this.
It really was something to see Shohei Ohtani step to the plate as a Dodger in a competitive game for the first-time ever. It was also cool to see OF Jackson Merrill make his Major League debut for the Padres - just the fourth player under 21 to make an Opening Day start in center field. Andruw Jones (Braves, 1998), Ken Griffey Jr. (Mariners, 1989), and Don Hahn (Expos, 1969).
There is just so much talent on one field between the Dodgers and the Padres. I mean, it is an absolute bacchanal of star power. Ohtani, Fernando Tatis Jr., Mookie Betts, Manny Machado, Freddie Freeman, Xander Bogaerts, Tyler Glasnow, Yu Darvish, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the list is endless. The Seoul Series is going to be a heck of a lot of fun, and I’m just thankful for the opportunity to see Ohtani take competitive at-bats that actually mean something.
And, while I’m not a fan of the regular season commencing an entire week before *actual* Opening Day, I for one am just thankful that baseball is back.
It is a very good day to be a fan of America’s National Pastime.