Opening Day 2007

Baseball opens today, April 1st (no foolin’). Cardinals host the Mets tonight at Busch. Glory. In honor of the occasion, here are two favorite quotes about the greatest game ever invented:

Terrence Mann (played by James Earl Jones) in Field of Dreams:

“Ray, people will come, Ray. They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll turn up your driveway, not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. ‘Of course, we won't mind if you have a look around,’ you'll say. ‘It’s only twenty dollars per person.’ They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it; for it is money they have and peace they lack.

And they’ll walk out to the bleachers, and sit in their shirt-sleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game, and it’ll be as if they'd dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they'll have to brush them away from their faces.

People will come, Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again. Ohhhh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.”

And Fox Mulder (played by David Duchovny) from The X-Files:

“I’m reading the box scores, Scully. You’d like it. It’s like the Pythagorean Theorem for jocks. It distills all the chaos and action of any game in the history of all baseball games into one tiny, perfect, rectangular sequence of numbers. I can look at this box and I can recreate exactly what happened on some sunny summer day back in 1947. It’s like the numbers talk to me, they comfort me. They tell me that even though lots of things can change, some things do remain the same.”

If those aren't enough to get you excited about 162 games between now and October, read artist Makoto Fujimura's experience with Cardinal baseball last summer (it’s kind of long because of the Yankees references, but be sure to read to the end for the Redbird redemption).

Play ball!