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March 30, 2004 Prospectus TodayOpening (Yawn) Day, 2004The road to hell is paved with good intentions.Four years ago, when the Mets and Cubs became the first teams to open the season with a short series in Tokyo, I went to bed early, set my alarm for 2 a.m. PST, jumped out of bed right around that time, watched the game and fired off a diary of the experience for posting that morning. It was a fun exercise, especially since it was a pretty good game and I had at least a few hours' sleep. So with my...er, the Yankees opening their 2004 season in Japan, I figured this would be another opportunity to get a fun column out of it. Being on the East Coast now, though, and with no real sleep pattern to speak of, I elected to stay up all night to do so. I guess that was my first bad decision. My second was asking Grady Little to be my insurance policy in case I dozed off. As you'd expect, Little eventually got me, but just a few minutes too late. Figures. So I missed the first half-inning, the one in which Hideki Matsui thrilled the crowd with a double, and Jason Giambi opened his season with a two-run home run. When I turned on the game, I was terribly confused; Mike Mussina was on the mound wearing pinstripes, but the ESPN2 graphic told me it was 2-0 Yankees in the first frame. But...how...could...Mussina...be... Finally, through the fog came enlightenment. I recalled that despite being the road team, the Yankees were wearing their famous pinstripes as a means of enhancing the experience for the Japanese fans. While disconcerting for tired Americans trying to make sense of dawn baseball, I happen to think this was a pretty good call by MLB, since the Yankee pinstripes are iconic in a way that other uniforms simply aren't. Now, for the even-more-embarrassing part: I didn't make it through the game. This was a Yankees/Devil Rays game. It was in Japan, it was the season opener, it was a special start time, but...it was the Yankees and Devil Rays. Using it to try and stay awake almost certainly violates the warranty. My last clear memories are of Mussina being squeezed in the fourth inning, leading to two Devil Rays runs on a Toby Hall single. Those runs were the only ones of the 11 in the game that I saw, actually, although I did manage to catch a few pitches in the top of the ninth. So today, I'm the hanging-head-in-shame columnist. I only saw about four innings of the season opener, which is the fewest I've caught in perhaps a decade. Still, I took some notes during the parts I watched:
I hope all of you got to see more of the game than I did. Regardless, here's the important thing: THE SEASON HAS STARTED. Baseball's back, and that is one of the few absolute goods I can think of. Six months of love, folks. I'm a happy boy today.
Joe Sheehan is an author of Baseball Prospectus. 0 comments have been left for this article.
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