Tomorrow, Tomorrow, There's Baseball, Tomorrow

You may have wondered if I actually survived the winter, and whether I just wrote the last 80 columns ahead of time and flew off into space, unwilling to face a day without baseball.  I can happily answer that no, I did not fly off into space, or anywhere else, and while the weather this winter was record cold for this county, I am still here and survived.

That means that tomorrow, March 29, 2018, actual major-league baseball will take place, and I can watch a real game that counts in the standings.  Sure, the Grapefruit League (the spring training contests daily in Florida the past month) have been at least something, they were but a tease.  It is all practice, after all, a time when the juvenescence of the season meets the senescence of the fans who emerge from their retirement villages to populate Florida stadiums for the games.

I am, of course, a diehard fan of the Boston Red Sox (and here is my obligatory line that no, I am not from New England but lived the majority of my life in Virginia; there is no explanation for fandom).  I am essentially equally passionate in my hate-filled detestation of the New York Yankees, the Red Sox's arch-rival.  A sad day without a Red Sox win is utterly made whole if the Yankees lose.  And the fact that the Red Sox have three 21st Century World Championships to the Yankees' one, well, that is a pleasing factoid that won't be changed soon.

So tomorrow the Red Sox will take the field against the Tampa Bay Rays, under the roof of the dome in Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, and begin the 2018 championship season.  I do not know what will happen, because although the Red Sox are a much deeper team, they will play Tampa Bay 19 times in 2018, and will almost certainly not win all of them.  Tomorrow could be one of those days.

I don't believe that in almost 65 years of being a fan, I have ever actually bet on the outcome of a baseball game and, if I have, it was not to win money but to make some game more (or "even more") interesting than it might otherwise have been.  The vagaries of the game are such that we fans speak of a "reverse lock", meaning that when a game comes up with the most mismatched starting pitchers and a lineup that strongly favors the team also with the stronger starter, it is fun to bet the weaker team as being more likely to win.

Over the course of a season of 162 games, an utterly outstanding team will still manage to lose 60 or more of them, somehow.  Such is the outcome of the sloggage of a long season.  But I love baseball, in part for just that reason.  Lose a game in 15 innings?  There's another one, with a freshly-lined field and a 0-0 score, in less than a day, much as a losing pull at a slot machine gives way to the promise of the next one, not that I'm advocating playing slot machines, of course (and the Carolinas are not exactly chock full of casinos).

Boston goes into the league season as the two-time defending Division champions, while the Yankees have accumulated a team full of large people who hit long homers at a prodigious rate, but with a questionable starting rotation.

Each team can make a substantial argument for its expected supremacy; the Sox rotation is certainly better, and its young lineup core features players in their mid-20s at all three outfield positions, third, short and catcher, all of whom should improve over their 2017 division-championship season.  New York will give the all-time team homer record a run, if the lineup stays healthy, and will score a lot of runs.

Come October -- and that's a long season away -- we will know how things have played out, and whether or not the principal players across the league will have stayed injury-free enough to perform near their peak.  I'll enjoy the journey, I'm sure, and the playoffs will be especially satisfying after the enormous time investment of the season.

I'll have things to say along the way.  I'm just happy it's finally gotten here.

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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