Opening Day, the Baseball Holiday

As the calendar turns from March to April, a madness turn into a fever.

Spring fever, that is. And it seems like the only prescription for spring fever is a trip to one’s local ballpark for Opening Day.

The 2015 season marked the 140th Opening Day for Major League Baseball. The first Opening Day, also the first game played in the National League, was on April 22, 1876. Boston defeated the Philadelphia Athletics 6-5 at the Jefferson Street Grounds in Philadelphia.

Future Hall of Famer George Wright, playing shortstop for Boston, was the first batter in National League history, while “Orator Jim” O’Rourke, another future inductee, patrolled center field for the visitors that Saturday.

The New York Clipper, in describing the day’s events, noted the “weather was favorable and the attendance large, over three thousand persons being inside the inclosure (sic).”

Starting at 3:40 pm, the game lasted just over two hours and “was sharply played throughout, the Bostons winning by their superior fielding and base-running.” Indeed, Boston broke a 4-4 deadlock with two runs in the top of the ninth inning, thanks to “desperate base-running,” and withstood a Philadelphia rally to win the game.

Despite Philadelphia and Boston having the honor of playing the first Opening Day game in Major League Baseball history, over the years another city has come to be associated with the season’s lid-lifter. Cincinnati has always been a proud baseball town, and as long as there has been a major league team in the Queen City, odds are that there would be a home game on Opening Day.

But why Cincinnati?

The answer does not seem to be clear and may involve multiple possibilities.

Some have speculated that since the Cincinnati Red Stockings were the first professional baseball team, the Cincinnati franchise has been scheduled to open at home – often as the first game on the schedule – nearly every season since 1876. According to Greg Rhodes, the Reds’ Team Historian, “it appears it was a combination of geography, opportunism, and money,” though the true reason has been lost to the history books.

As Cincinnati was often among the southern-most cities in the league, Rhodes explained, it made sense to have a slightly milder climate play host to games in mid- to late-April. Fields might be in better shape than those in cities such as Chicago or Boston.

Additionally, as competing major leagues entered the baseball scene, it became important to draw more fans in order to survive. Knowing that the Reds would open at home became a selling point for Frank Bancroft, the Reds’ business manager.

“The Reds could make this an annual affair, and [in] 1890, after the Reds re-joined the National League, Bancroft tirelessly promoted the opener,” Rhodes mentioned. “And for that, Bancroft, or ‘Banny’ as he was fondly called, is remembered as the ‘Father of Opening Day.’”

Though the Reds no longer host the first MLB game played each season, they still have one of baseball’s most enduring Opening Day traditions. As Opening Day became an event in Cincinnati, other attractions were added. Simple parades promoted the game and featured marching bands and both teams. As more businesses and fan clubs got involved, the parades became larger and more organized. But in 1920, the fans from the Findlay Market set the stage for a Cincinnati tradition.

To celebrate the team’s victory in the 1919 World Series, shop owners and other fans walked roughly one mile from the Findlay Market – Ohio’s oldest continuously operating public market – to Crosley Field, to await the first pitch of the 1920 season. Rhodes described it as resembling “one large roving tailgate party,” but it soon became the biggest and best run of all the parades.

The Reds and the Findlay Market Association continued the tradition after the team left Crosley Field. Former Cincinnati owner Marge Schott once said, “The Findlay Market Parade is Opening Day! Without the parade it just wouldn’t be Opening Day!”

Today, the 96th Findlay Market Parade, featuring nearly 180 marching groups, will wind its way from Findlay Market to downtown Cincinnati in time for the Reds’ tilt against Pittsburgh at Great American Ball Park.

President George W. Bush hurled the ceremonial first pitches before the first Washington Nationals home game in 2005 and before their first-ever home game at Nationals Park in 2008.

Two years later, on the 100th anniversary of Taft’s first pitch, Barack Obama did the honors at Nationals Park, rankling some observers for wearing a Chicago White Sox cap (in celebration of his favorite MLB team) in addition to his Nationals jacket.