When Opening Day arrives, we tend to look forward.
Today is Game 1 of 162 and if the season is a success, there is bonus play waiting for us in October. The Cubs have a lot to look forward to with a team of great youth, but also of great wisdom.
Joe Maddon sets the tone of versatility, instilling a sensibility for all players that they must be willing to be whatever piece is needed for the team’s puzzle to be complete. Play left field, third base, first base, right field, and you too can be Kris Bryant, a league MVP and World Champion.
Yet all of us not only look ahead to the fresh cut grass and the days of summer bliss, we also reflect and capture our memories. A time when we reconnect with what inspired our love for the game as a child, just as I remember wearing the plastic helmet of my favorite teams and imitating all of the stances of my favorite players.
I have been fortunate to have many different relationships with the game of baseball.
I was a huge fan as a child who grew up in New Jersey, outside with my brother playing Wiffle Ball or inside playing with baseball’s great card game, Strat-O-Matic, when the rain took over our day. Either way, I was building a connection, one that made me closer to my brother, but also one that appreciated the patience that such a game requires. I learned that good things can come to those who wait.
It is 162 games, one day at a time and as my coach, the late Jimmy Piersall, once told me “and this game will bring you to your knees.”
MLB
At the time, he was talking about the stresses of competing in this game, the intensity of what a young player like Ian Happ may feel at times when he realizes that baseball always asks you to “do it again.”
But as I have aged, I found another meaning in Piersall’s words. We can kneel in humility, being thankful of the feeling I had on the first day on the Cubs 1994 roster when my locker was next to Ryne Sandberg’s. His real jersey was hanging outside, next to my locker, and this was not a sporting goods store, this was the actual Cubs locker room.
I had arrived.
Then I began to have my own Opening Days as a major leaguer. Eight of them, when all was said and done. One year, I asked veteran teammate Mark Grace if he still got nervous. He just smiled and let me know that he still did after all of these years. As he explained, it helped him know that he still cared. Cared about being productive, cared about winning, cared about representing both the logo on the front and the name on the back of his jersey. History and legacy.
Once my big league days were behind me, I became a father and soon began to understand Opening Day as part of life’s cycle, a way to pass something on that was part of how I shared a passion with a loved one. As my daughter said when the Cubs won the World Series: “Look at everyone, they are so happy.”
I told her: “It has been a long time…for everyone who cares about this team.”
Opening Day is not just opening something. It is remembering. It is loving. It is reconciling. It is both looking ahead and looking behind us.
When I look, I see being a fan of Shawon Dunston’s, then being his teammate. I see watching Rick Sutcliffe pitch, then working with him in the booth. I hear Harry Caray’s voice, then I remember him by the note he once wrote me. I see stepping in the batter’s box at Wrigley, then I remember giving Ron Santo a hug the day we retired his number. I stop in amazement that I had Fergie Jenkins and Billy Williams as coaches the same year. It is a continuous path that allows different generations to speak the same language before television and long after launch angles.
Today, we share one time, a blend of past, present, and future, and together we ride this first pitch until the last breath.
We must always remember that despite the game’s requirement, we take one pitch at a time and we need to find the passion to always say “let’s play two!”