Rosy Glow – Opening Day Musings

By

Andrew DeMarco

“There are only two seasons winter and baseball.” – Bill Veek

With opening day behind us and a new season under way, hope springs eternal for the 30 major league teams. The hope being that World Series Championship, okay maybe 29 teams I forgot about the Cubs. A new baseball season is a sure sign of Spring which after this winter is much needed. Besides a change of the seasons a new baseball season always brings change which is inevitable. For instance,one change is that the Boston Red Sox are the World Series Champions and have won more World Series in this Century than their rival the New York Yankees. (Talk about the universe being turned upside down.) It should be noted however that the last century started out the same way and we all know how the 20^th century ended. Change is inevitable! Well maybe for every team except the Cubs.

But one really big change that will take place this year is the use of instant replay in baseball. This too seemed inevitable since it is already used to varying degrees in football, basketball, and hockey. Now I don’t know where you stand on this but I am not a fan of instant replay in any sport, even if it could benefit my team and I will tell you why and use baseball as my example. Baseball as true for the other sports is a game played by human beings and human beings make mistakes. This is not a game of pinball or a game played on an X-box, it is played on a field by humans and to err is human. During a game, a fielder can make an error and a coach can send a runner when he shouldn’t and that is a mistake. Even the manager makes mistakes. For instance, he may bring the infield in and that backfires or he may make a decision to walk a batter and that batter hits one out of the park. They may not seem like mistakes but they are since basically any error in judgment is a mistake. So if players, coaches and managers can make errors and mistakes why can’t an umpire? If an infielder boots one does he get a do-over? I don’t think so, but basically the umpire is getting a do-over.

Future change and inevitability is the retirement of Derek Jeter after this season. This gives Yankee fans a whole season to get ready for that big change and Derek’s retirement was inevitable, although I am sure there were some Yankee fans who expected to see Derek playing shortstop with a walker. His retirement tour will soften the blow of the change, until next spring training when all the talk will be about life without Derek. One other change that will occur after his retirement is that we will not hear as much mention of the Core Four (Jeter, Posada, Pettitte and Rivera). That is unless the Steinbrenner’s decide to build a Mount Rushmore like monument to them on a mountain top in the Catskills, probably in the Cooperstown area. Maybe they can call it “Mount Corefour” and find a way to monetize it to pay for all their free agent acquisitions.

But there is one change that has crept in afew years ago and may have gone unnoticed by many. As far as I know it was not put in place by MLB and the Commissioner did not issue an edict demanding it. This change was not inevitable and was bought about by sportscasters, reporters and writers which to me is unnecessary and just plain annoying. It has to do with tradition, vocabulary, jargon, grammar, plurals and syntax whatever you want to call it and doesn’t affect the game, but again it is just an annoying and unnecessary change. You may ask what can get him so annoyed about baseball. Understand that it is not about baseball, but I am annoyed with those who claim they love the game, those who cover and report on it on a regular basis.

OK! I want to know when did RBIs become RBI? Have you noticed that when reporting or calling a game, announcers have now taken to saying, “he had a great game with 4 RBI.” Since I can remember, and I am sure even way before that, it was reported as 4 RBIs. I want to know who decided that this was wrong. What grammarian, announcer or reporter all of a sudden decided that we had to change this. Now we all know that it is Runs Batted In and if you really want to be correct let’s call it RsBI. How great would sound good! Jeter had a good game with 3 hits and 4 RsBI. Let’s face it things become established in the English language and they become the norm. For instance, when I was growing up ain’t was considered poor grammar, but now it is pretty much accepted. RBIs is still the accepted form according to the New York times Crossword. While doing my puzzle the other day the clue was Hank Aaron had 2,297 of these and the answer was RBIs. If it were RBI I could not have finished the puzzle.

Now that my rants are over and hope is springing eternal for all baseball fans, even Cubs fans and with the new season underway, we can all look forward to enjoying our National Pastime. There will be quiet evenings enjoying the games at home, those Saturday afternoons with friends at the local bar and that occasional trip to the ball park, all of which will give us all that feeling that Cousin Bob would call that……Rosy Glow.