Monday is opening day for most major league baseball teams.
On this same day 40 years ago, a crotchety correspondent named Harry Reasoner, the anchorman at my network, ended our evening newscast with a commentary about the national pastime.
His final words spoke volumes: “Baseball isn’t baseball without a hot dog in front of it.”
In other words, itap about more than just the game.
Friday afternoon, at this season’s home opener at Coors Field, I’ll watch baseball the way Harry wanted us to: amid a crowd of fanatical fellow fans and a team with a shot at the World Series (everyone’s a contender on opening day), and a hot dog in front of it.
Of course a lot has changed in those 40 years, including the hot dog. Nowadays it comes with a comprehensive collection of frou-frou condiments — I tried the frou-frou version once myself, but when I squeezed the bun to take a bite, half of it ended up in my lap. Friday, I’ll just have what Harry had in mind: the dog, the bun, some old-fashioned yellow mustard, period.
And how about the bigger changes since Harry’s day! For starters, if anyone mentioned the Colorado Rockies back then, they meant the mountains. And even when major league baseball gave Denver its franchise 25 years ago, the team, the game and the nation were a far cry from what we have today.
We’d never heard of al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. Nor Monica Lewinsky. Nor the iPhone. Nor, mercifully, much about Donald Trump.
Of course we’d also never heard of the players who populated our brand new baseball team. Expansion clubs like the Rockies had to pick from other clubs’ rejects. But from the moment a reject named Eric Young became the first Rockie to take the plate in Colorado and swatted a 3-2 pitch into the left-field stands, the record-setting 80,227 of us who scored a seat never forgot “E.Y.” Nor his only other home run of the season — on closing day. Three hitters later in that first inning ever, fellow reject Andres Galarraga propelled his pitch into the stands, just feet from where E.Y.’s had come down. The first of his 22 homers that inaugural year. We never forgot the Big Cat either.
But eventually the Rockies forgot us. They sold or traded the E.Y.s and the Galarragas we’d learned to love. They scrimped and saved and put the ballclub in baseball’s basement.
In the good old days, fan favorites were family. Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Sandy Koufax, they played their entire careers for a single team; Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, nearly the same. But the rules of the game off the field had changed, and our revered, rehabilitated rejects moved on.
Today, union contracts mandate that even the least gifted player earns more than a half-million bucks, minimum. The most gifted? Rockies outfielder Carlos Gonzalez this year will pull down $20 million for punching out pitches and pulling down fly balls. By comparison, Mantle and DiMaggio were the first Yankees ever to earn six-figure salaries.
And if some impatient baseball executives have their way, the rules on the field will change. Less time between innings, less time between pitches, less time out of the batter’s box. They call these proposals “pace of game.” Geez, letap just call it “baseball” and leave it alone. You know what these changes would save in a typical nine-inning contest? Five minutes, 10 at most. Don’t make the game something it isn’t.
What I love about baseball is what it is: the only game with virtually no constraints from the clock, a slow game where you can see every ball and follow every player and track every move they make. A game with no substitute on a sunny day or a summer night. A game meant to be watched with a humble hot dog in front of it.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen is an author, public speaker, and former foreign correspondent for ABC News.
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