The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly beginning to the baseball season

Everything in life can be summed up with a line or a title from a Clint Eastwood movie.

Thinking about asking that hot waitress out at your local bar, the one who seems to always be a little flirty around you and is always touching your shoulder when she takes your order?
"You have to ask yourself one question. Do I feel lucky. Well, do yah, punk?"

Having trouble digesting that spicy Mexican food you ate for dinner and you want to subtly let your wife know that you’re having a problem?
"Anyone who doesn’t want to get killed better head out on the back."

Deciding whether or not this is the right time to mention to your African American friends that you have long served as the president of the Don Imus Fan Club?
"Dyin aint much of a livin, boy."

See, all things can be decided by simply listening to Clint Eastwood and his sage advice.

But the most important categories of life come from the title of Clint’s best work ever. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is not only one of the great all time westerns ever put on film, it is also usually a pretty accurate description of ones college love life. You had the good girlfriends that you broke up with because you had convinced yourself "hell, if she likes me, some Victoria’s Secret Model somewhere out there must be dying for a piece of this."

The bad are the ones that came after that particular brain storm, the ultra boring, the ultra crazy, the ultra emotional chorus line of girls that came through your life as you desperately tried to convince one or two of the good ones to break up with their current boyfriends; you know, the ones that already went through the bad crop and are pretty much ready to go Jeffrey Dahmer on anyone who even thinks about stealing her away.

And the ugly? Well, if you’re a male and you went to college, no more explanation is needed. If for some reason you are a college freshman book worm who hasn’t figured out the complexities of balancing good study habits with a Keith Richards’ approach to partying, just walk around campus on a Saturday morning and look for a guy strolling along, head down, hair disheveled, obviously wearing clothes from the night before, with a look on his face that closely resembles the look Eli Manning has every time the camera shows him trying to make sense of his eighth sky high pass that overshot his receiver by 25 yards, and you have just witnessed a man who knows all about the ugly.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly can be applied to every aspect of life; a day at work, a family outing, a meal at Denny’s, and yes, especially sports.

So, for the first installment of this segement of our blog we'll take a look at the opening of the baseball season, the first signs of spring.

The Good

The NFL has screwed up the beginning of their season with the nonsensical Thursday game and their lame opening acts that seem to scream "yeah, we’re the biggest sport in the land, but if we throw in a P-Diddy sponsored concert we might even make a few more dollars." Football should be played on Sunday and Monday, with a few Thursday games thrown in at the end of the season, like the Thanksgiving Day games. Opening the season on a random Thursday and then making everyone wait around for three more days to watch your sport is just stupid. It doesn’t make any sense. The NFL a lot of times is like that abusive husband who knows his wife will never leave him no matter what he does. Slap the fans around, and they will keep coming back.
Baseball, however, has the right approach. The Sunday night opener is a relatively new event, but it is benign overall. It feels like Monday by that point anyway. Then the season opens. Monday hits and baseball is back on the schedule.
Ever since I was a kid I have tried to finagle my way into staying home to take in the different games and different ball parks. Of all the sports, baseball seems to be able to preserve the feeling of newness each April. It is almost as if you are stumbling across the sport for the first time every year, and even though ESPN and the internet makes sure I can see every at bat of every player playing the game, and then hear it analyzed by at least 15 former players, there still seems to be something exciting about watching the Reds take on the Cubs on opening day. Baseball does a few things better than any other sport and opening day is one of them.

The Bad

Then, after opening day, baseball proves to the world, once again, that they are run by a group of people constantly on the look out for a way to screw up their own success. For instance, why would any sport start their season with so many off days built in? Why get fans on the hook and then take the game away from them every chance you get? As 1994 proved, absence does not make the heart grow fonder in the world of sports.
Baseball, unlike any other sport, has a rhythm to it. It is like a nightly soap opera. You get used to it being there every night. Some days you want to watch it, other days you don’t, but it becomes your spring and summer companion. Baseball fans get into that flow. They don’t need to continually check their On Demand calendar of events to know if a baseball game is on. They are, for the most part, always on, with the exception usually being Monday games.
But early in the season baseball makes it "rain" off days Pacman Jones style. Why? Players are as fresh as they are going to be the whole season. There are few, if any, nagging injuries. The players haven’t been beaten down by the wear and tear of the longest sports season in the world. They are pretty much at their peak.
So that’s when you give them the off days? When people are dying to watch the sport after a long winter hiatus? I understand baseball not wanting to give the most off days in the middle of September pennant races, when the excitement of the season and the national interest is at an all time high. But why do it right in the beginning of the season, when the interest is still pretty fresh? Why not spread the off days out over May and June, when the newness of the season has worn off and interest is in a little hibernation mode? That way you sustain interest in the opening weeks, keep baseball moving through the summer months when kids are out of school and keep the excitement of pennant races in tact. Makes sense, doesn’t it? That means baseball will never, ever do it. What fantasy leagues in all sports reminds us is that Corky from Life Goes On could run a professional sports league. It just isn’t that hard. If you can stand for more than five minutes without drooling and falling over, you are qualified. Unfortunately, few executives actually pass that test.

The Ugly

The off days, really, are just a little blip on the screen compared to baseball’s idiotic decision to continue to have opening days and opening weeks in the Northern parts of the country. Note to baseball; Al Gore is a moron!!!!!! If global warming is wreaking havoc on the tundra region and killing off Polar Bears with Indian summers that last 12 months now, the effect hasn’t found it’s way to the USA just yet. Please, please, PLEASE can we start, from now on, all opening days in domes or warm weather climates?
I love how baseball doesn’t think it is fair for the fans of those areas. Like somehow they are doing the fans in Boston or New York a great favor by asking them to go to games in weather that is so frigid Jim Leyland is forced to smoke 15 cartons of cigarettes a game just to keep his body temperature above freezing.
The fact that the Indian played all of three games in the first week and a half, had an entire series SNOWED out, cancelled their double header when it didn’t even snow because the grounds’ crew couldn’t thaw the field in time, and had their series with the Angels moved to a neutral site in Milwaukee (who were smart enough to put a dome on their stadium) is an utter disgrace.
And when do we not see this happen?
Want to know how you define the job description for a MLB administrator? When you are asked to do the same things over and over again expecting a different result. Who are the guys sitting in MLB headquarters every year saying "I know we had a problem opening the season in some cold weather towns last year, but this year it seems like April should be really, really warm."
What is the problem opening the season in the North later on in the month? The Mets did that and it seems like they were able to somehow develop a marketing strategy good enough to fill the ball park (it’s called being a good team). And while it wasn't 75 degrees at Shea, it was a heck of a lot better than the arctic circle conditions everyone was forced to play in two weeks ago.
And who are we concerned about, anyway? The Mets, Yankees, Red Sox, Tigers, White Sox, Cubs, and Indians are drawing no matter when you schedule their opening days. Those fan bases have proven for decades that, even when the team stinks, they’ll show up to open the house doors for another season. And if a team is going to stink, all you are losing is the possibility for one sell out. Do you think the National’s season fortunes, a season that promises to be one of utter futility on a perhaps historic level, would have been different if they started the season at home in frigid weather in D.C. rather than down in Florida? Do you think fans would be turning out in droves to watch a bad triple A team play? Again, maybe some would stay home because the Nationals, only a week into the season, had proven they couldn’t find the playoffs with Sacagewea guiding them with a flashlight and a G.P.S., but they would have stayed home starting on day two. There was never any hope for that team and the fans knew it.
So please, baseball, let’s look to move these opening games away from the frozen ice lands in the future. Can we get that done?