Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Mariners' Opening Day, MLB Give Me a Break

In less than four hours, the Seattle Mariners and Oakland Athletics kick off the 2012 baseball season. As a baseball lover through and through and a complete Seattle homer, I wish I could tell you that I will be watching opening day live. However, I would be completely lying to you. The reason being is that like most Seattle and Oakland fans, I live in the Pacific time zone and it will be 3 AM!

It's wonderful that MLB decided to start opening day in Japan and Seattle is probably the best team to play a regular season game in Japan. This is because the majority owner of the Mariners is Hiroshi Yamachi, the former President of Nintendo. Also they have had probably more Japanese Major League Players, with Ichiro Suzuki being the best. In fact, it probably could be debated that Ichiro will be on of the greatest Japanese baseball players ever. 

Now, my question is this, why can't MLB start the game during sometime in Japan that most people will be up on the West Coast? Japan is 15 hours ahead of the West Coast, so why can't they play an afternoon game there? Then everyone could enjoy the game and we could all watch King Felix take it to the A's.

I'm so very excited to watch the Mariners, with a slew of young position players to include: Dustin Ackley, Justin Smoak, Jesus Montero, Mike Carp, Casper Wells, and even Michael Saunders. More exciting are the players who haven’t even been called up to include: Vinnie Catricala (my favorite prospect because every picks against him being a good major league player) and three of the best pitching prospects in baseball James Paxton, Danny Hultzen, and Taijaun Walker.

So welcome baseball season and go Mariners. Just for the future, could we please start the games at a normal hour next year? Many of us are lucky to have jobs, given the state of the economy and we would at least like to keep them, so 3 AM is not an option.