There is something amazing about the beginning of a baseball season. After a winter spent projecting and predicting and hypothesizing, guessing, and wondering, today is the day that we finally start building towards something. Today will give us 1/162th of what the final 2013 Pirates will be. That seems like a little impossible nothingth, but what is baseball if not a collection of impossible nothingths that build into something?
AJ Burnett takes the mound for the Pirates against the Cubs and Jeff Samardzija. The Pirates' lineup will be what you expect, only with Gaby Sanchez at first base and Garrett Jones in right field. I suspect that we'll see this lineup quite a bit, as opposed to the expected Tabata/Snider platoon in right, because it's the only way to keep a left-handed bat on the bench against right-handed pitching. I think that sacrificing production for pinch-hitting is dumb, but I am not a Major League manager.
The first pitch today is at 1:35. It's cold, but it's still baseball.
