It's Opening Day. So What?
Posted March 31st, 2008 by Evan WeinerBy Evan Weiner
March 31, 2008
(New York, NY) -- Opening Day is here. Big deal. At one time in the United States, Opening Day meant the beginning of the baseball season, that spring in the northeast and Midwest was arriving and Opening Day, which occurred in mid April not March, was akin to the old adage, 'tis the season when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love. It was a changing of seasons and a vista to new opportunities. Opening Day is that mythical time which signaled a rebirth, after all it came after spring training which actually started in the winter in the warmth of Florida or in a desert outpost in a far away, sparsely populated place in Phoenix, Arizona.
In ancient Greek and Egyptian mythology, a phoenix is a mythical bird with gold and red plumage. At the end of its life-cycle the phoenix builds a nest of cinnamon twigs that it then ignites. The nest and bird burn and are reduced to ashes and from those ashes a new, young phoenix arises. Phoenix is a perfect place to house Major League Baseball's Spring Training in terms of symbolism.
But Opening Day just isn't what it once was nor is the grand old game of baseball. Baseball is just another entertainment form and is no longer the top sports attraction that it once was say in 1950. Looking back to the 1950s, baseball, boxing and horse racing were the foremost sports in the United States, pro football was a step above the semi-pro level and maybe one of two notches below college football, the National Basketball Association was formed in 1949 after the merger of the Basketball Association of America and the National Basketball League and was playing second fiddle to the Harlem Globetrotters and college basketball with franchises entering and leaving the new league. The National Hockey League was confined to just Boston, Chicago, Detroit and New York in the US along with Montreal and Toronto in Canada. Baseball only ceded its importance for two days in the spring, the first Saturday in May when the Kentucky Derby was run and on Memorial Day and the Indianapolis 500.
Television rearranged sports in the 1950s as more and more people purchased TV sets and more and more areas got TV stations. By 1965, professional football featuring 15 teams from the National Football League and eight more from the American Football League became more popular than America's National Pastime, baseball, according to polling. Professional football proliferated because of TV, and because of TV, National Hockey League owners started to think about expanding beyond the so-called "Original Six" back to a bigger circuit which was the case prior to 1942. The National Basketball Association had started to put teams in major markets in the mid to late 1950 through the early 1960s because of TV. By the 1960s, Major League Baseball was no longer the biggest fish in the pond; the other sports started catching up. Boxing and horse racing were beginning to become after thoughts although Cassius Clay "revived" the sports when he won the heavyweight crown in 1964 and made boxing eminently intriguing after he changed his name to Muhammad Ali, refused induction into the United States Military in 1967 and was stripped of his title and made a comeback in 1970 leading to the Ali-Joe Frazier match up on March 8, 1971 at New York's Madison Square Garden. Ali certainly kept boxing in the mainstream.
Major League Baseball has done an enormous amount of adapting over the past five decades to shifts in population, embracing TV and understanding that it no longer is the pre-eminent sport in North America. It took baseball barons a long time though to figure out that they needed to make changes in order to survive in a competitive marketplace and that the industry could not be confined to just 16 franchises in 11 cities all east of the Mississippi River like it was in 1952, although technically St. Louis, Missouri is west of the river. What has emerged from old line baseball thinking is a global entity that is looking to gain traction in countries like Ghana, China, and South Africa and playing regular season baseball games in Japan.
Baseball is now a 365 days a year global business. It has to be that way because it has too much competition from other US and international sports. African-Americans have turned away from the game in increasing numbers and that has forced baseball to look globally for players. African-Americans have focused their attention on getting college scholarships from the glamour sports of football and basketball and left baseball behind for a myriad of reasons. Some parents in California and Texas have pushed their children into ice hockey, California, a state that has a lot of desert, is producing hockey players as is New Jersey and Texas, all non-traditional hockey areas. Then there is the explosion of youth soccer in the US. Major League Soccer is just another global soccer league, way down on the ladder from the English Premiership but more and more kids are playing soccer and in the US, youth baseball and youth soccer overlap. In some cases, soccer takes precedent over baseball.
Baseball purists and traditionalists are alarmed over the direction the "game" has taken. But business is business and taking Opening Day to Japan is crucial to future successes. Playing two pre-season games in China is important, particularly since the NBA has become so enormously popular in China and that there is a potential of huge revenues that cannot be ceded to just the NBA in the world's most populous country.
Baseball officials have watched basketball become the second most popular sport on the globe behind soccer.
Baseball has the World Series which is its crown jewel but baseball also has its World Baseball Classic that will be played in 2009 which it hopes will become a crown jewel global event. The 2009 World Baseball Classic will be played prior to Opening Day 2009. Tokyo, Japan, Toronto, Ontario, Mexico City, Mexico and San Juan, Puerto Rico will host opening round contests, three of those cities are not on American soil. The National Pastime is expanding beyond the US borders.
So it is Opening Day. It really is no big deal. In the United States, baseball's Opening Day is just another event and competes with the NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament for attention. Opening Day comes up about 10 days before the start of the National Hockey League Stanley Cup Playoffs, a couple weeks before the NBA playoffs get underway. There is also the start of the Major League Soccer season, NASCAR has been running races since mid February, Tiger Woods is already burning up the golf course and the Masters (which used to precede Opening Day way back when the baseball season used to start in mid April and thus not having to share the spotlight with baseball) is around the corner. Even the NFL takes time away from baseball every spring with its late April draft. In the old days, the NFL would start its 12 game schedule during the last week of the baseball season. Baseball no longer has time to itself. Back in the 1950s, baseball would own all the news cycles except for the Kentucky Derby and Indy 500 events. The NHL and NBA started seasons around World Series time and those leagues playoffs would end around baseball's opening day. Baseball now competes on a daily basis with every other sport that is played.
Opening Day is still romanticized by some, but truthfully other then some public officials being trotted out to throw out the "First Pitch" it is just another day or night in a business that never takes days off. So it is Opening Day. It's no big deal anymore. There is just too much else going on and baseball no longer stands out like it did back in 1950 when Opening Day had a stronger symbolic presence than it does today. After all, baseball doesn't even play its opening games anymore in the country where it is the National Pastime.
