Good morning. I woke up at 6AM to watch the MLB regular season begin in Seoul, South Korea. Yet Spring Training is still ongoing. Heck, the two teams playing right now in regular season games that count will be playing Spring Training games that don’t count by the weekend. For all other teams, the season starts on March 28th. So is Opening Day today or next Thursday?
Opening Day wasn’t always this complicated. The Cincinnati Reds, baseball’s first professional franchise, has opened the season at home every year since 1889, with the exception of 1966 because of rain, and 1990 and 2022 due to owner lockouts. In 1920, Cincinnati hosted an Opening Day parade to celebrate the team’s World Series victory the previous season. Since then, Opening Day has become a de facto holiday in the city, with the Findlay Market parade as the focal point. As this tradition grew, MLB began scheduling Cincinnati to host the first game of the season, typically on a Monday afternoon with all other teams scheduled to play the next day.
Sometime in the 80’s or 90’s, MLB had enough of this tradition. Professional baseball was always for-profit, but teams operated relatively independently. It was during this period that Major League Baseball, the entity, began exerting more control over teams to better grow revenue. To better grow revenue, MLB needs national TV deals and sponsorships. To secure more lucrative deals, MLB needs to increase the number of eyes on its product. To increase the number of eyes on its product, Opening Day becomes Opening Night and the marquee game is played between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, not the Cincinnati Reds and Milwaukee Brewers. MLB’s growth mindset also means getting the product in international markets, which leads to an Opening Day in the middle of Spring Training where first pitch is 6AM EST, or 3AM PST, on a Wednesday.
The overarching theme of my on-going project, If They Don’t Win It’s a Shame, is how baseball, or rather Major League Baseball, is a microcosm of America and capitalism. Baseball, more than any other American sport, is steeped in history and tradition. The business of baseball, however, is business. When tradition confronts business, MLB will seek profit at a cost to fans like myself.
In our society, reactionaries bemoan the loss of traditional values, like religion and the family. Most like to blame the “liberal communists,” but they should look to baseball for the answer. It’s our old friend Capitalism who is to blame. Capitalism itself becomes religion: capitalists are the priests, places of work are the places of worship, and capitalist ideology reinforces the values and behaviors needed to accumulate capital. The pursuit of capital, inevitably, leads to globalization as international markets are a source of raw materials, cheap labor, and consumption. In this process, the world is homogenized, social relations change, and old traditions need to die so Capital can work its magic. Opening Day needed to be taken from Cincinnati so that Mattress Firm could be the Official Sleep Wellness Partner of Major League Baseball.
Five years ago I went to Opening Day in Cincinnati to experience baseball’s holiest day before it’s too late. It was my first time making stadium photographs on film and my first attempt at making serious work documenting ballparks, even if my principal interest at the time was surface level glamor shots. What I saw were mirrors of myself - people happy to once again hear the crack of the bat and root for the home team.
Cincinnati may no longer be the city that welcomes a new season, but how Reds fans honor the occasion is everything Opening Day should be - a cherished date on the baseball calendar that celebrates the birth of spring and the national pastime.
Yet in the hands of profit-chasers, it’s just another opportunity to cash-in.