Oh, look. Tomorrow is opening day...er...Opening Day...er...Opening Day!...er...OPENING DAY!!!!! This Blog understands this to have something to do with baseball, an amusing little relic of our dim national past that once ranked with horse racing and boxing at the top of our American sporting consciousness. This Blog loves baseball. By and large, it's played outdoors, in the warm height of summer, and it hangs heavy with nostalgia for a simpler time. It's like a Renaissance Faire, except with tobacco and televised crotch-adjustment.

Regular visitors may recall that This Blog is a baseball agnostic. Likes the game fine. Really likes having a cold one at the ballpark of a summer evening. But whatever that extra thing is, whatever baseball has that makes maundering children out of slumming poets and distinguished professors of history, This Blog is immune to it. That, of course, goes double for most of its artistic manifestations -- especially the egregious lump of cinematic goo that is Field Of Dreams, which manages to deface the memories of Shoeless Joe Jackson, J.D. Salinger and, in the person of the shrill Mrs. Kinsella, the entire decade of The Sixties.  This Blog will buy several copies of any baseball memoir the first chapter of which ends with the writer's attending his first game with his Dad, as long as the anecdote ends with,

 "...and then he sold me to a bunch of sailors in the bleachers for fifty bucks and a pack of unfiltered Camels. I never saw him again."

Nevertheless, welcome back, baseball. You know one of the reasons I don't get you? This kind of nonsense. A young guy's not supposed to swing away in a situation because of some secret Templar code that Jim Leyland and Buck Showalter have tattooed on the inside of their eyelids? "Baseball etiquette," my Aunt Fanny. Get over yourselves, the lot of you.

Of course, This Blog is giving the great Joe Poz another summer to convert it.