It’s Started…Dear God, the Marathon Has Started

by Jason Franz

The bloom is off the rose. The compost is beginning to stink. Happy Earth Day. The long haul of Major League Baseball’s season has officially arrived.

Opening day is a celebration where all is new and baseball is at its most exciting until the post-season rolls around – some six months later. Some of that even carries into the first few series where walk-offs are celebrated with scrums on the infield and dugout-emptying brawls seem edgy, not tired.

Every win matters. The rhythm of the season, or at least the perceived rhythm, is set.

And then the final week of April arrives. Your team has had at least one run through the big division rival and key injuries are starting to take hold. The play-by-play guys start sharing anecdotes about their pets instead of actual baseball.
 

This was never more evident than today’s series and home stand closer where the Arizona Diamondbacks beat the hapless and uninspired San Diego Padres to win their seventh of seven series to open the season. This feat was repeated endlessly by the D-Backs voices, belonging to Steve Berthiaume and Bob Brenly, ad nauseum. Apparently, this is the first time it’s been done since the San Francisco Giants did it in 2003, which seems strange that that’s actually 15 years ago now. Those Giants did go on to win the NL West that year, so that’s something, I guess.

Patrick Corbin threw another fine game, pushing his record to 4-0 and his ERA down to 1.89. But this kind of thing is now ho-hum because all we really heard about was the make-believe pitch from the Padres’ young starter, Joey Lucchesi, who sounds like he just rolled in from the set of Jersey Shore and sports the cheesy facial hair to match. He allegedly has developed some new thing called the “Churve,” a sort of change-up curve ball that took the D-Backs all of one time through the lineup to figure out. By the bottom of the 4^th, the churve was getting launched all over Chase Field, staking the Snakes with all the runs they would need.

Honestly, Berthiaume and Brenly must be so bored themselves already that they just couldn’t stop saying the word “churve.” The only thing that took them out of that zone was when they had to promote the special Dog Days of Summer ticket offer for all the desert dwelling dog owners who feel having dog shit at the ball game is that one thing missing from the experience. They then carried on a near full-inning conversation about if Berthiaume’s dog can speak or not. Riveting stuff.

This kind of thing is not unique to the Diamondbacks. ESPN is already providing insights in the context of “the course of the long baseball season” and making items like the Giants’ Brandon Belt’s record-setting 21-pitch at-bat their top headline. Pardon me while do not care.

The only true antidote to surviving the marathon is to actually get to the yard to watch games in person instead of on TV (or the internet). Of course, this realization kicks in just as the D-Backs head out of town for the next week and summer begins to descend on the Valley of the Sun. Yay, us!