Baseball Here for Real With the First Pitch of Just Another Game

Ah, nothing like Game 2 of the regular season to soothe the soul and introduce real baseball for another year.

Game 2?

What happened to the season opener?

Nothing. They had one Monday night. They have one every year.

However, it is getting to be that Opening Night--notice the capital letters--is more fantasy than reality. Major league teams go from playing a month of games that mean nothing to a game that has come to mean too much.

That one game has been promoted for months, almost as though nothing comes after it. The Opening Day Starter is a most special pitcher. The stadium is decked in red, white and blue bunting. Radio shows originate in the parking lot. Ushers wear white dinner jackets.

The season opener is hype and hoopla time.

Give me Game 2.

I know, you’re going to say I’m the kind of guy who wears blue on St. Patrick’s Day, eats sauerkraut on Cinco de Mayo and reads a book on New Year’s Eve. You’re just waiting for me to say, “Bah, humbug.”

OK, I confess. I did wear blue on St. Patrick’s Day. But I’m not a Bah Humbug kind of guy.

The season opener, you see, is almost like a party with a game thrown in as a sideshow.

Give me The Game . . . all by itself.

Give me Game 2. It has every bit as much of a chance of being a great game as the season opener, and each counts as exactly 1/162nd of the season.

So I watched Opening Night on television, my friend Duke adroitly tap-dancing back and forth between baseball and basketball with the remote control.

And then I went to Game 2, partially to see if anyone shared my sentiments . . . but mostly because it was baseball without the frills.

“Opening Night’s special,” said Tim Flannery, whose Monday night start was his first in a season opener, “but it’s nice today because we’re just going to play ball.”

That’s all, and that’s nice.

“I was talking to a buddy of mine yesterday who goes to a lot of games but couldn’t get tickets,” Flannery said. “I’d already given mine away. I told him it was like church on Easter, where everybody who hasn’t gone goes.”

The pace was much more leisurely Tuesday. Unlike circuses, baseball games are meant to be that way.

It’s almost as if Opening Night was a hurdle rather than a milestone.

“Everything is centered on Opening Day,” said Jack McKeon, the manager. “It’s like a must situation that you’ve got to win. It gets blown out of proportion, and everything’s magnified.”

Of course, this season opener came at the end of the Padres’ best spring training.

And they lost that season opener.

“We play great during the spring,” said Tony Gwynn, “and then we lose our first game. We all wanted to play well and win the first game and send a full house home happy. So now they go home and say, ‘What a bunch of hype. They’re not as good as we’ve heard.’ ”

It wasn’t pretty, as the Padres ran themselves out of big innings, and Eric Show walked San Francisco into a big inning.

“It looked ugly,” Gwynn said.

On May 17 or June 6 or July 23 or August 11 or even on April 4, there would not have been so much attention focused on winning or losing and the little things that were a part of that result.

McKeon, for one, absorbed some of the heat from that inordinately bright spotlight. He had left Show on the mound to work himself out of the seventh-inning jam, and the Giants scored three runs to win, 5-3.

“What am I supposed to do,” he asked Tuesday, “alter my style for one particular game?

Only if it’s the seventh game of the World Series, and maybe not then. It is McKeon’s style to be patient with his starting pitchers.

“We’re going to get burned, and we’re going to lose ballgames,” he said. “You’ve got to remember that it’s a 162-game season.”

That’s right, but you know what Game 1 is like.

“If you win it,” Flannery said, “you’re automatically in the playoffs. Right?”

Wrong, of course.

It just seems that way, just as some folks seemed to think losing that season opener was like getting knocked out of some single-elimination tournament.

After all, how could any team lose the season opener and come back to make the playoffs?

So that one game, that one-night trip to fantasyland, was behind the Padres as they arrived at the stadium Tuesday afternoon.

“Well,” said Tony Gwynn, “we have 161 more games. Now we get down to business . . . just like if we had won last night.”

Welcome, then, to Game 2 . . . and the rest of the season.