Opening Day 2023

Today is Opening Day.  For the last six weeks, I have pretty much ignored watching Spring Training games or caring about which players are doing well and which are failing miserably, but today?  Today the games marked indifference felt during Spring Training will be replaced by actually caring (to the extent that one actually "cares" about sporting events) about the games being played, and for the next six months, we will pretty much have games to watch, listen to, read about, wager on, and enjoy, and that is a good thing.

Yes, I know all about the inequities of the the game as practiced by Major League Baseball, and how the shitty ownership by Bob "Mr. Dithers" Nutting has turned the Pittsburgh Pirates, a team that I have loved for sixty-four years now, into an irrelevant joke, but I still love the Pirates, still root for them, still will watch.  Maybe that makes me part of the problem, but there you go.

The Pirates have lost 100 games for the last two years - and would have been last three years had not COVID made for a sixty game season in 2020 - so what possible reason for hope can there be that it will be any better in 2023?   

How about this?

• The addition of Old Guys Andrew McCutchen, Ji-Man Choi, Carlos Santana, Rich Hill, and Vincent Velasquez to provide leadership and, we hope, some actual quality baseball ability.
• The continued development of Young Guys Oneil Cruz, Ke'Bryan Hayes, Jack Suwinski, Rudolpho Castro, Mitch Keller, Johan Oviedo, and Roansy Contrras.  Plus, a couple of new names like Canaan Smith-Njigba, and the hopes of seeing guys like Quinn Priester and Endy Rodriguez at PNC Park sometime this summer.

On the other hand, there is the concern as to whether or not the team's best player, Brian Reynolds will sign a long term contract (fat chance of that, given the team's well known modus operandi) and whether or not he will be here for the entire season.  Oh, and the bullpen consists of David Bednar and a bunch of other guys.  And the two catchers will combine for a sub-.200 batting average, but boy, can they frame pitches.  

I bet the OVER on 67.5 wins for the team this year, which means a minimum of a six game improvement over 2021's 62-100 record.  We won't know until the last week of the season whether they will be able to pull that off, but it will give us a reason to watch right down to the wire.

On a broader sense, I am very much looking forward to watching baseball with the pitch clock.   As I said, I watched very little spring training baseball, maybe six or eight innings, tops, but it was immediately apparent to me that the pace of the game had improved dramatically as a result of this change, and time of game stats that MLB has been bombarding us with all Spring bears this out.  It will be a real joy to know that games you attend or watch on TV that start at 7:00 will be over, for the most part, well before 10:00.

Enjoy the season, everyone.

 

Mitch Keller gets the ball for the Pirates this Opening Day