Baseball’s Back, and Not a Second Too Late

There is a wise saying, and possibly an old country song (I'm not an expert on either subject), that says "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." Until Sunday, I never gave the phrase a second thought. On opening day, however, I realized that saying to be completely false.

The reason: I love baseball.

I got so caught up in the excitement of the NBA regular season (thank You, Kobe), the NCAA tourney (the first time I've followed college basketball closely in at least a decade), and the NHL stretch run (just kidding, no one watches hockey), that I forgot how much I love baseball.

Then the season started on Sunday and suddenly I realized how much I miss the little things about baseball. As I watched about 8-10 games in the first few days, I couldn't help but notice some of the things that make baseball great.

Here are a select few:

I like hearing ESPN's Jon Miller pronounce Spanish names and putting the emphasis on the second syllable, no matter what. Carlos Bel-TRAN. Adrian Bel-TRE. It kills me every time. He could just be better than everyone at his job and he is actually pronouncing all of these names right and everyone else is wrong. Frankly, I don't want to know.

In case you didn't know, the Giants have an 82-year-old ball boy down the left field line. Seriously. The highlight of opening week for me may have been after someone fouled a ball off down the third base line and it ricocheted off the wall and into shallow left field, about 15 feet in front of Bonds and a good 15 yards away from the old man. Bonds then turned around and faced the left field stands pretending to be oblivious to the ball while the old man made a horrific dash for the ball. It was creepy, classless, and comedic all at the same time.

Speaking of Bonds, I watched the Giants/Padres game on Wednesday night on the MLB package, and it was the FSN Bay Area feed. It was refreshing to watch the local announcers broadcast the game without mentioning steroids, BALCO, Victor Conte, or his hat size. Don't get me wrong, I despise Bonds and loathe the fact the he is going to hold the most prestigious record in sports in a few short months, but it was nice to hear the announcers analyze his impact on the game that night, instead of analyzing his impact on how America views the game.

Another thing I like about watching out-of-market games is watching how the fans react to certain situations in the various ballparks. In Kansas City, for example, the fans impressed me this week. In the season opener against Boston, prospect du jour Alex Gordon made his big league debut for the Royals. His first at bat was with the bases loaded, nobody out, and Curt Schilling on the mound. The crowd gave him a standing ovation on his way to the plate and remained standing the entire at bat. They all wanted so badly for this kid to make a huge first impression that they were trying to will him into a grand slam. So what happens? He struck out on a nasty splitter, the likes of which he surely didn't see in double-A last year.

The point is, this guy is the future there, and the fans showed they are behind him from day one.

The Seattle fans need to take note. In Wednesday night's blow-out against Oakland, Richie Sexson came up in the fourth inning with his team trailing 5-0 and two men on. Rich Harden was perfect through the first three, but had allowed three hits already in the inning (one erased by a double play). Sexson homered in each of the first two games, so the crowd must have been pretty pumped up, right? I mean, they are one swing from being right back in the game.

Nope. No one stood up. No one cheered. No one was trying to will a rally upon the team. It was just business as usual. Either the city hates Sexson, hates baseball, or hates showing any emotion at all. Either way, he popped out to end the inning, and I say through no fault of his own.

You know how sometimes at the stadium after a player does something good, the scoreboard will flash a cheesy pun using the player's name, or play a movie sound bite that happens to contain the player's name? Well, Pedro Feliz singled in the tying run against San Diego and I was upset with the Giants for not playing the clip of manager Lou Brown from "Major League" saying, "Big knock, Pedro, big knock!" Sure, maybe their ball boy wouldn't have gotten the reference, but it still would have both been funny and fitting.

To me, these are the things that baseball is all about. It is a game of so many nuances that if you only watch highlights you can't get the right feel for the game. You miss the ball boys, the announcers, the scoreboards, the trivia questions.

You miss all the good stuff.

So maybe I was too sidetracked by other great storylines going on in sports to miss baseball, but one thing is for sure: I'm glad it's back. Here's to another 160 games worth of entertainment.