There’s a morning in late March that doesn’t get enough credit.
Not Christmas morning. Not the first morning of summer vacation, when you wake up and remember you have nowhere to be. I mean the morning of Opening Day — the day the Cincinnati Reds play their first game of the season, and something in the air shifts, even if you can’t say exactly what.I felt it this morning. Couldn’t tell you why, exactly. The calendar says March. There’s still a chance of a frost before the month is out. The tulips that came up last week are looking at the forecast with what I can only describe as nervous energy. Nothing has changed.
Except everything has.
Let me tell you something about this part of Indiana that people from the outside don’t always understand.
We are Reds country.
Not Chicago country. Not Cardinals country. Not some kind of free-agent fan base that floats with the standings and pledges allegiance to whoever’s winning. Down here, in Ripley and Franklin and Decatur and Dearborn counties, the Cincinnati Reds have been the team since before any of us were born. You could draw a line on a map — somewhere north of Indianapolis, maybe, or somewhere east of Terre Haute — and below that line, the radio has carried Reds games for generations. People’s fathers listened. Their grandfathers listened before them. Some of those old radios are still sitting on the same shelves.
That’s not a sports preference. That’s geography. That’s heritage.
WRBI has been the home of the Reds in southeastern Indiana for decades, and I say that not as a commercial but as a simple fact: on summer nights in this part of the state, a lot of people fall asleep with the game on. Not because they can’t stay awake. Because the sound of a baseball game on the radio at ten o’clock is one of the most reassuring sounds in the world, and always has been.
I am not going to bore you with a season preview.
There are websites and podcasts and entire television channels dedicated to telling you what every analyst thinks about the starting rotation and the projected lineup and the defensive metrics at shortstop. You don’t need me for that.
What I want to talk about is what Opening Day actually feels like.
It feels like permission.
Permission to think about summer. Permission to make plans. Permission to believe, for at least one morning, that this is going to be the year — even if “this is going to be the year” is something you have said, with full sincerity, in many years that did not pan out. That hope is not naivety. That’s not wishful thinking. That’s what a season is for.
Baseball is the only major sport that does this. Football starts in September and the weather already feels like it’s turning. Basketball starts in November when you’ve already accepted the darkness. Hockey — bless its heart — exists primarily as a reminder that there are things happening in arenas that you are not attending.
But baseball starts in the hinge of spring, when the world is in the process of coming back, and it hands you a schedule of one hundred and sixty-two reasons to check in over the next six months. That’s what a Reds season is. It’s not a championship chase — though a championship chase would be welcome. It’s a companion. It runs alongside your summer the way a creek runs alongside a county road. You’re not always paying attention to it. But you’d notice if it wasn’t there.
I grew up in this. I don’t know when I learned the Reds were the team — it’s like asking when I learned how to breathe. They were just there. The Big Red Machine was mostly before I was paying attention, but I absorbed its legend the way kids absorb family mythology. You don’t need to have been there. You just know.
I remember the transistor radio, or the one that sat on top of the refrigerator, or the one in grandpa’s basement workshop that he’d sometimes take out to the picnic table on nice nights to just sit and listen. There was a rhythm to it. A summer rhythm. The day had its obligations — whatever needed doing, got done — and then the evening belonged to the game, more or less.
That rhythm is harder to find now. Everything competes for your attention all the time, and most of it is louder than a baseball game on a Tuesday night in June. I understand why people drift away. I don’t hold it against anyone.
But I’d encourage you, if you’ve drifted, to come back this year.
Not because this particular Reds team is guaranteed to make you happy. I’ve been doing this long enough to know better than to guarantee that. But because a summer with baseball in the background is just a better summer than one without it. Because there’s something to be said for a sport that gives you five months of Tuesday nights.
Around here, Opening Day has its rituals.
Somebody puts on a Reds shirt that hasn’t been worn since last year — and discovers that September was apparently a very optimistic month, food-wise. Somebody else wanders out to the garage and finds the radio they used last September, still tuned to the right station, just waiting. Kids who didn’t care about baseball six months ago suddenly need to know the batting order.
The game itself, today’s game, probably will not be a masterpiece. It doesn’t need to be. Opening Day games aren’t about the baseball. They’re about the return. They’re about the feeling that the long nothing of winter is officially over and something is happening again.
Down in Cincinnati, there’ll be a parade this morning — the one tradition in American sports I find genuinely moving, because it doesn’t require the team to have won anything. They just show up and the city comes out to say we’re ready. We’re here. Let’s go.
I like that. We should all be so willing to show up and say: we’re ready. Let’s go.
A long time ago, somebody in this part of Indiana found The Reds on 103.9, and decided that was their team. I don’t know who it was in your family. It might have been your grandmother. It might have been a great-uncle who worked the fields and needed something to listen to in the evening, and the Reds were on, and that was that.
Whatever the story is, somewhere along the line the choice was made — and it got handed down, the way choices like that get handed down around here. Not as a big decision. Just as the way things are.
Opening Day is the morning you remember that.
Welcome back.
Brent Lee is the morning host at WRBI 103.9 FM.