When you say “Opening Day” what else could it be but baseball? Yeah, some stores will claim “opening days”and maybe some other sports seasons, but we know the real opening day is baseball.

In many baseball towns it is too early to play baseball, and the players dread going out in forty-degree weather after spending a delightful spring in Florida or Arizona. Some of the Caribbean-born players may suffer swing or arm slumps until May, so chill is the air in the early season.  It doesn’t seem right to play the summer game in sub seventy-degree temperatures.

But play they will. Every game counts, so shorten up the swing and loosen up the arm for five innings until the weather breaks warm.  They will play to two-thirds empty stadiums, the crowds, socially distanced,  welcoming and shivering at the same time.  No cries of “beer” and “hot dogs” will salt the air, because no selling in the stands for now.  In the party suites there may be excessive eating and drinking.

But we are hungry and thirsty for baseball as well. Baseball has suffered from the lack of in-person entertainment more than any sport. It is a panoramic sport with action at every corner of the field: fielders shifting, runners taking a lead, batters shifting, and then the contact or lack of contact with the ball. There’s the sign out in center field you can read only with binoculars, and magnificent beer spillage from a foul ball down the right field line.  And the swell of crowd noise that signals every event on or off the field.  The crowd knows everything.  You just have to be there for the full experience of baseball.

For me, April 8 at Busch Stadium will be the first Opening Day I attend in person.  Getting the tickets was a major skirmish, and I ended up paying too much for seats in a party suite on the left field line. Wait, did I say I paid too much for Opening Day tickets?  Is there still a balance in my bank account? All right, whatever, I paid it.

The excitement may also mark a solemn event: the transition of my fan loyalty from the Red Sox to the Cardinals. After three years in St. Louis, the time has come.  I was seven years in Boston before I gave up on the Yankees for the Red Sox, but that was a more vicious rivalry. I will still follow the Red Sox, but I have my Cardinal regalia, I am in Busch Stadium on Opening Day, I have learned their starting line-up, I have quaffed their beer (which is no treat). What is left to make my commitment? I am a Cardinals fan.

One more thing about being a Cardinal fan. The weather feels like baseball on their Opening Day, which will be April 8.  Partly cloudy, high in the 70’s is the forecast.  St. Louis really is a baseball town.