Unleash the Beasts

Now that our animals have been properly beaten and the weak weeded out, the most vicious of beasts are ready to begin the grueling joust of the regular season.  Tigers will claw at White Sox, as they are apt to do, since everyone knows tigers love eating old socks, while the perpetually creepy Twins (come on, twins are creepy) lie in wait.  Rays will shine while Blue Jays soar through the skies to dive bomb Yankees (whatever the hell a Yankee really is).  Cardinals will tweet (no, not Tweet) and get drunk with Brewers, and little baby bear Cubs will fight Pirates and win.  The regular season commences!

At this nascent stage, optimism runs rampant in the most unlikely of places, like Baltimore, where the baseball is nearly as depressing as the crime rate, and that's the beauty of early April.  Despite--or perhaps because of?--the rain (and rainouts), we feel reborn, a clean slate to scribble stats all over, and yet wisened with another season of failure or success under our belts, tucked away next to lessons learned of who strikes out when and who not to trust in a double play situation.  Our benches are replenished with some old names, some new, and as of right now, everybody--from the Pujols to the Ecksteins to the Longorias to the various Ramirezes and Gonzalezes--everybody's batting average is a shiny .000.  But without even taking the time to catch our breath, to enjoy the unsullied splendor of a blank scorecard, we jump in, and for a (very) short time BAs will be stratospheric and ERAs will be microscopic (and vice versa), and the question becomes "Just how long can he keep this up?"  League leaders will change daily, but the frontrunners make their presence known immediately, fast becoming the Lincecum-wheat among the Arroyo-chaff.

But for now, we sit in the eerie calm as the storm rolls in.  Spring folly no more, these ones count.

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And now, a message from your oh-so-jovial Oppo Field groundscrew:
Good evening and welcome to our friendly confines.  Here at Oppo Field, we strive to provide you with a range of opinions and a slew of information about the daily goings-on in the American Major League Baseball Competitive Gaming Confederation™.  We hope to engage in mostly meaningful, but occasionally incoherent conversations on what was once America's Favorite Pastime (until everyone decided they liked watching commercials periodically interspersed with a bastardized version of rugby for whatever reason [this parenthetical does not represent the views of Oppo Field groundscrew in toto, but still, come on]) on a fairly regular basis.  We'll do our best to stay up to date, but we encourage you, the readers, to continue the conversations below, at least until we get sick of approving all of your comments.  Thank you.