Opening Day
Spring hopes eternal.
People a lot more poetic than I am have written just about everything there is to say about Opening Day. Fresh starts. Clean slates. Untarnished optimism. Blah blah fucking blah.
Here’s the thing though: there’s no such thing as a true reset in real life. The present is always a function of the past, and the future is at the mercy of both. We don’t ever start over, absolved of all our missteps. All we really do is move to the next chapter.
Opening Day isn’t about starting something completely new. It’s about taking the next step toward the thing you’re trying to accomplish. With that in mind, as I am about to embark on this ambitious trek to ballparks across the country, let’s look at the Opening Days that I’m building off of.
I graduated from college in 2001 and moved back home to Toledo. With diploma in hand, the world was full of opportunities. So I did what any newly minted telecommunications school graduate would do… took a customer service job at a call center. The starting pay was more than I would’ve hoped to earn a few years in as a TV or radio lackey, and the work hours accommodated my modest rock ‘n’ roll dreams.
I spent most of that summer showing up for work at 10 a.m., leaving work early every day and trying to avoid having my soul crushed by the constant onslaught of people complaining about their cable bills. I filled my days with ballgames on TV and my nights delivering sandwiches (which also filled the hole in my wallet from leaving the call center early every day.) By the fall, I had been offered a supervisor position, which was my cue to give my two weeks notice.1
The Mud Hens were building their new ballpark when I came back to Toledo. I don’t know exactly how we swung it, but my housemates and I scored standing room tickets to the first game played at Fifth Third Field on Tuesday, April 9, 2002. It was a chilly, overcast home opener for the Hens, and the wind whipped relentlessly past our station along the rail above the left field fence. The weather never kept the sellout crowd from rooting our Hens on to a 7-5 victory over Norfolk: we did our part by letting the Norfolk left fielder know repeatedly that he’d never get the call up to The Show and, in fact, he had better get good at selling insurance.
This was the first of 11 consecutive Hens home openers I would attend, even though I would move from northwest Ohio to Columbus in the summer of 2004. Hometown pride ran deep.
Upon arriving in Columbus, I didn’t take much of an interest in the Clippers, the local AAA team in Cleveland’s farm system. For one thing, it took me a while to find a job, eventually settling on an assistant manager gig at a terrible pizza shop. I had to work a lot to get out of the hole from moving and my hours were primarily from 4 p.m. to closing, leaving very little time or schedule flexibility to go to many games.2 My girlfriend at the time wasn’t interested and it took me a while to find any friends in town who enjoyed a night at the ballpark.
After about a year, I took a job at a merchandising company based in western Ohio that did work in the political realm, but I still nominally lived in Columbus. Splitting my time between the two places was enough to sink my relationship after a couple years, and it almost did in my passion for baseball too. I was still making it to Toledo for Hens home openers, but from 2006-2008, I was at the beck and call of some very high profile political campaigns that didn’t leave much time for days at the diamond.
The day after the 2008 election, I met the absolute love of my life. And while she’s not a weirdo baseball obsessive like I am, she did let me know early on that she liked to drink beer in the sun at a ballgame. I took her up on that.
The Clippers left their rundown Cooper Stadium digs in favor of a brand new ballpark in the relatively new Columbus Arena District after the 2008 season. Unlike the opening of Fifth Third Field, I do remember how I scored tickets to the opening of Huntington Park: I got online right before tickets went on sale and furiously refreshed my browser until I was able to buy four bleacher seats.3
I’ve lived here in Capital City for almost 20 years now and I’ve lost track of how many games I’ve seen at Huntington Park. While I definitely don’t root for the Clippers’ parent club and still break out my Hens hat whenever they make the trek down from Toledo, I politely clap my hands for my hometown nine and occasionally loft some pointed jeers toward the opponent’s dugout.
The penultimate Mud Hens home opener in my 11 year streak also happened to double as my bachelor party. Deciding that nine innings of 10,000 drunken fans wasn’t enough, the team scheduled a double header for the 2011 opener and kept the party going for a full 14 innings. I don’t remember where I slept that night, so “mission accomplished,” I guess?
I finally broke the streak in 2013, having been freshly laid off from my print company job, drawing unemployment and not really seeing the value in driving to Toledo to hand over that pittance to the Fifth Third Field beer vendors. I haven’t been back there since, home opener or otherwise, mostly because I spent the next four years changing careers twice.
After spending about four years hopping from kitchen to kitchen, working my way up the brigade until a few partners and I opened our own bar and restaurant, “the life” caught up with me. I was stressed out, burned out, failing and floundering. I was either going to lose my kitchen or my marriage, so I put out some résumés and landed a “real” job.4
That real job had me scheduled to attend a political fundraiser in Cincinnati on Opening Day in 2017. I figured if I was going to be there anyway, I should probably try to go to the game. I managed to snag a pair of standing room tickets for $40 a piece: one for me and one for my wife. Now you have to either have season tickets or win a damn lottery for a chance to buy Opening Day tickets. The cheapest standing room tickets for tomorrow’s game are more than $100 a piece. I know inflation’s bad, but damn…
Reds fans treat Opening Day with a level of enthusiasm that other fanbases just can’t touch. The city has all but declared it a municipal holiday. It’s an all-day party with a parade from Findlay Market in Over-the-Rhine to the ballpark down by the river that draws more than 130,000 people. Great American Ball Park only holds about a third of that: the rest are content to cheer on the Reds from nearby Smale Park or at their tavern of choice.
Long story short,5 if you’re a baseball fan, you should do Opening Day in Cincy at least once in your lifetime. As for me, I’m a man on a mission – and a budget – so I’m going to Cincinnati Reds game #2 this Saturday. Thus begins the next chapter.
I need to tie this thing up in a way that makes sense. From here on out, most of my blog posts will be reports from the road.6 This whole adventure is an attempt to get my head straightened out, to de-stress and reset my mind and body, to try to find joy in the things that always used to deliver it. The last couple of years have been a challenge that I wasn’t prepared for and have taken a huge emotional toll. I don’t know where I’d be right now if not for the support of my wife, Erin.
She’s watched me fall apart, riddled with doubt, desperately searching for direction and purpose, trying to put myself back together. Through it all, she keeps me from spiraling, puts things in the proper perspective, helps me remember what I need to do to get through the really tough parts. I don’t know how many times since I first decided to take this sabbatical trip that I’ve contemplated canceling the whole thing, only to have her talk me off the ledge. She’s right about everything, even when I’m too consumed by my own anxiety to accept it.
Today, on the eve of the new baseball season and just days before I officially kick off my own campaign, I’m learning from what’s behind me but keeping my momentum moving forward, thanks in large part to Erin always having my back and pointing me the right way.
I’d be lost without you. I love you. Thank you.
I hope all these pictures are OK. I think you look cute in ‘em. Even this one…
Soundtrack:
“I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”
- Groucho Marx
I did watch Dave Roberts notch the most famous stolen base in baseball history late on a Sunday night with a mop in my hand as I was closing up shop, so I guess the job didn’t totally kill my opportunities to watch the game.
Best tickets available after what I assume was a secret presale to the Columbus cognoscenti and Friends of the Mayor. My lord, this footnote needs footnotes.
Anyone who disrespects kitchen work, be it high-end or fast food, can cram it with walnuts. It’s dangerous, stressful work that isn’t valued nearly enough for how essential it is to a functioning society.
Still pretty long though.
“Finally,” says every single person reading this.
You may have missed your calling as a writer. Or, maybe you are just finding it. Either way, I look forward to reading your boys of summer updates. For the record, as the kids would say, or as the kids used to say, "I'm jelly."
Safe travels.
I love you too! Even though I’d LIKE to see some Guster in that soundtrack.