On Opening Day, anything is possible

It doesn't feel quite like spring yet, and it most certainly isn't hinting at summer, but the sunny season got started this week when Major League Baseball opened its season on March 31.

Baseball has begun, and as soon as the NCAA Tournament clears the airwaves (Go Memphis!) and the NBA playoffs drag on for what seems like months, baseball has the country's sporting consciousness to itself until a chill is back in the air.

Opening Day signals limitless possibilities and the chance, no matter how far-fetched, that even your basement-dwelling home team can have a year to remember.

For me, a St. Louis Cardinals fan since birth, it's a chance to believe that the fresh-faced ballclub will justify my having to become accustomed to a new lineup with a winning season and a shot at the postseason.

With steroids and human growth hormone looming over the game like a stormcloud, the first day of the season is a glimpse of what baseball can be; what it was.

I read the papers, I know that football is now king in America. The NFL packs stadiums and attracts many of the country's best athletes to bludgeon one another's brains out rather than learn to throw a wicked cut fastball or hit to the opposite field.

Football rewards the casual fan who needs only to tune in on Sundays to see the whole width and breadth of the league sorted out. It is a lazy man's game.

But baseball rewards the connoisseur. No sport on earth, and few other pursuits outside of sport, have the levels of statistical analysis now employed on the boys of summer. It is a thinking man's game, and has been since long before complicated algorithms showed armchair enthusiasts how to calculate the Pythagorean expectation (how many games a team "should" have won based on runs scored and runs allowed over a season). Managers ponder high percentage pitching matchups, infield shifts and lineup changes in a loosely choreographed dance through the season.

There's strategy and drama and enough storylines to keep sportswriters around the country busy year-round. And these dramas and tragedies are played out not just in front of national television audiences once a week, but in sparsely-attended Wednesday night games in Baltimore.

After a too-long winter without it, baseball is back.

—Alex Strickland