What is it that makes Opening Day such an awesome day, even when there’s no hope for the coming season? It’s got to be because baseball’s offseason coincides almost perfectly with winter, stretching from the first brisk days of November through the last bit of snow melting in early March. Then, the weather breaks, the sun comes out, and baseball starts. This is perhaps a bad analogy since today’s game is being played in a snow storm, but hey, I don’t make the weather.
I’ve made a couple of appearances on the UCB Radio Show this week and the Cardinal bloggers there have been asking what I want to see from the Pirates in this opening series. The answer is always the same: I want to see seven good innings from the starters every night. The back end of the bullpen can hold down the last two innings, but any starts shorter than seven innings are going to invoke the adventurous first half of our bullpen way too early. The weather in St. Louis is probably going to make that tough, at least this afternoon, but it’s really what I want to see.
Anyways, the early start time is going to make it hard for me to liveblog since I’ll be at work for the beginning and I’m going to be going home sometime during the game (hopefully), but I’ll be in the comments as much as I can and would of course encourage everyone else to join for the gamethread. I’m going to stick with the comments for the thread for now, but if they prove to be unwieldy, they may migrate to the forum for future games. Let me know which method you would prefer.
