Play ball!!!

What a great time of year we’re looking at right now. The weather might actually start getting consistently warmer. You seem to notice more birds. Flowers are slowly creeping out of the ground. Leaves are budding on the trees. There is a general sweetness to life that permeates–

{insert needle-being-dragged-across-a-record sound here}

Screw that– it’s steroid baseball season!!

Today officially begins the 2008 baseball season. I don’t count those two games Oakland and Boston played in Japan, nor do I count the Braves-Nationals game last night. It’s not Opening Day until all 30 teams are playing. More importantly, my St. Louis Cardinals. Should prove to be a very… mediocre year for the Redbirds. It’s quite a different team, albeit one with the same problem- they STILL have no pitching. They have Wainwright, but everyone else is so friggin’ inconsistent. But, stranger things have happened. That’s one good thing about the Comedy Central division- it’s almost always wide open from April 1 to October 1. Hell, Milwaukee almost won the division last year until they imploded with two games left in the season and literally handed the division title to the Cubs.

And be careful anointing the Cubs champions udda woild just yet, Cub fans. Every year the debate wages on between Cub fans and Cardinal fans, and it cracks me up seeing and/or hearing what complete numbnuts some fans are. On both sides. Cub fans like to bring up how the Cubs “beat the shit out of the Cardinals every year”, which they do, admittedly, and more or less have for many years. But dominance over one team doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. You play 162 games a season; winning the majority of 17 games against one team is like farting in a tornado if you can’t do well against the rest. It kills me the number of Cub fans that I have met* that are fine with a sub-.500 season so long as the Cubs “kick da Cardinalsss assssss”.

(* Don’t even start with the whole “oh yeah, well, Cardinals fans are conceited blah blah blah” crap. To an extent, they are. Even so, save the which-fans-are-better debate for the Ignorance-Is-Bliss wonderland known as the SJ-R message boards. Like it really matters in the first place. Even though most Cardinals fans don’t blame livestock and fans in the bleachers and curses and wind shear and global warming for their team’s misfortunes… but I digress.)

Of course, then you have those Cub fans that simply feel the other 29 teams should roll over and just give the World Series to the Cubs just because it’s been 100 years since their last one. And folks, “Lovable Losers” is not- repeat, NOT- something of which to be proud. The Cubs do have a better than average chance at the division this season, but we’ll see how it goes. Oh well, just so long as they finish ahead of the Cardinals, right?

Bottom line is that the word “fan” is derived from “fanatical”. Seems to me that baseball seems to spawn the most “fanatical” fans, more than any other sport. What cracks my butt the most is how some people refer to their favorite team as “we”, as in “‘we’ beat the {insert team} today”. Gee, tiger, I didn’t know you had a contract. There are people that really need a reality check and realize that it’s a friggin’ game, one over which you have absolutely no control, played by steroid-infused grossly overpaid little primadonnas that couldn’t care less whether you’re there or not.

But it’s still Opening Day today, and that’s friggin’ awesome. Time for six months of watching ESPN fellate the Yankees and Red Sox on national TV. The only thing that would make ESPN any happier is if Barry Bonds joined the Yankees, which, knowing the Yankees, isn’t out of the realm of possibility yet.

Anyway, as long as the Yankees don’t buy win the World Series, life is good.