LINCICOME: Selling of Opening Day reeks of greed

By Bernie Lincicome, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

The Boston Red Sox, those lucky so-and-socks who managed to squeeze by the Rockies four games to none in the World Series, have already started their baseball season in Japan, home of one of their star players.

Well, good luck with that. Opening Day has become Opening Dawn. Time for the seventh-inning yawn.

The Rockies, meanwhile, keep their passports tucked away safely and toil in the soft sun of Tucson, still nearly a week away from any games that count.

In other words, baseball season has opened before training for the baseball season has ended. This is like each team playing a series in football before warming up.

Or, Tiger Woods playing two holes and then going back to the driving range before continuing.

This sort of thing makes sense to baseball, a game that, do not forget, allows half its teams to hit for the pitcher and the other half to ponder the double switch.

One wonders if the Red Sox - the new Yankees, in terms of international popularity, apparently - can go where Daisuke Matsuzaka can read the street signs, maybe the Rockies ought to open the season in Vancouver, British Columbia, hometown of opening pitcher Jeff Francis, eh?

If baseball is selling off Opening Day, one of the grandest American traditions, to foreigners, and this is the third time for Tokyo (not to forget Mexico and Puerto Rico), why not just have every team open in the Dominican Republic, where most of the players come from anyhow?

I suppose there is no real harm in this, except that the games do count, and it is so blatantly anti-pastime, so unashamedly greedy, so utterly nontraditional, no matter the harm or benefit crossing the international date line to play before strangers will be to the Red Sox and the Oakland A's.

Opening Days will still be there in hometowns, the one here on Friday, April 4, against the Diamondbacks, with all the usual streamers and bands and local politicians, but I am guessing no one in Japan is going to stay up to watch.

The first pitch in Tokyo was 4:05 a.m. Denver time. The first pitch in Denver will be 5:05 a.m. the next day in Tokyo. Hey, it's the least they can do.

Baseball is trying to grow global markets, so we are told, and if so, that's what exhibition tours are for. Our Opening Day does not fertilize a single fan in Tokyo or in China or Prague that a spring-training game would not.

And if Opening Day is for sale, then why not the All-Star Game (which they can have) or even the World Series, the key word there being world.

Who asked for globalization, anyway? Who wants a quote, real, unquote, World Series? Baseball seems to have caught NBA disease.

Next to canceling the 1994 World Series and not canceling the designated hitter, this is the stupidest idea baseball has ever had.

Japan needs another baseball game like it needs another hatchback. If baseball wants to send a message, shouldn't it be going somewhere it's not? This is like sending another lawyer to Roger Clemens.

What is unforgivable here is the contempt for tradition, the disrespect for baseball's fundamental fabric, the diminishing of the rite of renewal. The beginning of baseball is more than just the first of many games. It is the uniting of community and hope and optimism.

There can be no greater promise than the first pitch of the first game.

In most places, in Denver until last September, optimism usually lasts only until the third inning or so, but that is no reason to peddle it to the Orient. Let them have sumo wrestling and pachinko, we'll keep Opening Day and Texas Hold 'em.

This is just wrong. I don't remember us gaining a greater appreciation for soccer just because we hosted the World Cup or that we have suddenly coughed up millions of tiny midfielders because of the arrival of David Beckham.

And one more thing. One of the great blessings of American baseball is its insularity. We may call it the World Series without involving the whole world, but that is our conceit and it is our business.

Let the British call their cricket championships whatever they want to or the Aussies their Australian Rules Football finale the Match of the Universe, for all I care. Just keep them where they belong.

To quote from an actual Japanese baseball fight song - "Man blooms as a flower on the earth. Baseball is drama, it is life . . . Fly away Yakult Swallows."

Makes Take Me Out to the Ballgame seem so deliciously crude. So American.