Opening Day Riffs & Rants

It's amazing what a 70 degree sunny April day in Seattle can do to for the soul.

Add in the fact that it's opening day, and the Final Four championship game, and you've got something akin to pay day at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC.

Leading off, the Mariners scored six runs on six hits. When was the last time they played so efficiently? A 6-1 win against the media darling Minnesota Twins is nothing to scoff at. Only 161 more games to go!

Griffey hit a bomb? Of course Griffey hit a bomb. He's not Garrett Anderson. All the nerdy stat heads, complete with their mathematics degrees from Havard, can take their .252, 17, 62 projections and find other professions. He's not Vin Diesel agreeing to go back to "The Fast & The Furious" because he's desperate/broke and never had talent to begin with.

Junior is one of four active first ballot Hall of Famers (Randy Johnson, ManRam andTommy Glavine are the others). He's not messing around.

In other baseball news, Cheese Cake Sabathia and the Yankees kicked off what is sure to be another melodrama in pinstripes with a 6-1 loss to Baltimore. Cheese Cake puked up six runs over 4 1/3 innings. He has one more start before SuckCenter starts asking Skip Bayless questions like, "Will CC Sabathia be the next Barry Zito?".

We saw two opening day rain outs as well. I'm starting to think MLB schedule makers pull these games out of a hat. Exlain why the Mariners and Twins, two teams that play in postponement free stadiums, opened the season together? The A's and Angels never have rain outs. Yet they played each other too. Tampa Bay plays in a dome. Boston plays outside. Why aren't they playing in Tampa? But of course, playing a game in Chicago makes perfect sense.

Did MLB hire the guy who thought Sarah Palin would win the election for John McCain to make this schedule?

As for the Final Four, talk about prime TV viewing. Maybe it's me, but more times than not, the championship game is only good for "One Shinning Moment" (please bring back the Teddy Pendergrass version). These games are rarely close (see Duke/UNLV, 1990). And listening to Clark Kellog drone on for hours is wholly unappealing.

Finally, for old times sake, I tortured myself with a little "Field of Dreams" on Opening Day. I've been doing this for years. And thanks to Youtube, I no longer have to dust off the DVD collection (worst investment ever).

I was relieved, and touched to see I'm not the only one who teeters on the verge of an emotional breakdown when watching the final scene. Read a few of the comments on this video. It is well worth it. It also might be the first time ever in Youtube history that the comment section isn't littered with four letter epithets. Go figure.