Just because I love baseball's opening day hardly means you will or should. Because it is equal parts illogical, innate and whimsical, I am not entirely sure love is transferable. I am no missionary and won't attempt to convert you to my love for baseball and opening day. But, please, indulge me for a moment if you could.
Baseball is easily the most poetic and literary of all American sports because its seemingly leisure pace naturally lends itself to introspection. Sometimes it is far too poetic and in love with itself. But other times, like on opening day, all the maudlin poetry seems to work. Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell once devoted more than 300 pages to the phenomena in his book Why Life Begins on Opening Day and William Carlos Williams, the bard of New Jersey, captured the essence of the season in Spring and All. Williams alluded to the fact that spring is rebirth and what defines spring better than opening day?
Yeah, for one day a year I love all that stuff because every team is in first place on opening day when it is all about hope, optimism and beginnings. This sense of gleeful anticipation was presumably also felt by Bryan Stow, a 42-year-old paramedic and father of two from Santa Cruz, California. Stow is a San Francisco Giants season ticket-holder so enamoured by his team's first World Series championship in 56 years that he decided to head down to Los Angeles with a couple of friends and watch his boys play their arch rivals the Dodgers on opening day.
He was among fans wearing the black and orange colours of the Giants amid a sea of Dodger blue and, apparently, feeling the heat for his choice of wardrobe. Halfway through the game he texted family members that he 'felt scared inside the stadium'. But this is baseball, this is opening day and this is Dodger Stadium, the crown jewel of baseball arenas when it first opened in 1962 and, thanks to constant renovations, still one of the most aesthetic and bucolic of all parks today.
After watching his Giants make a slew of errors and lose 2-1, Stow retreated to the car park with his friends, hoping to get as far as possible from Dodger Stadium. But before they could reach their car, he was knocked down from behind and repeatedly kicked in the head by a couple of brave souls who hooted and hollered, hopped in their car and somehow high-tailed it out of an overflowing car park into the night with the greatest of ease. Stow would be rushed to the hospital barely clinging to his life. If he recovers from the coma he is in, doctors say he is likely to have serious brain damage.
Stow may have gone to LA to simply watch opening day. But by the time he left Dodger Stadium in the back of an ambulance, he unwittingly emerged as a national referendum on violence in sports.