Opening Day! How Baseball is Wrapped in American History and Tradition

My Dad was a baseball fanatic, spending his youth at the Polo Grounds watching the New York Giants. Growing up on Long Island, one of my earliest memories is going with him to a Yankees game. Maybe that’s why baseball touches my soul.

Baseball has paralleled American history. It was played during the Civil War, two World Wars (many of the sport’s best players joined the military after Pearl Harbor), women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement and the explosion of modern technology. One of Thomas Edison’s first displays of the usefulness of the lightbulb was a night ball game in Massachusetts.

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It is a game of history and tradition. To quote the character Terence Mann in the movie Field of Dreams: “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steam rollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”

For some, baseball season seems to go on forever. Others hope it never ends.

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"You always get a special kick on Opening Day, no matter how many you go through," Yankees legend and Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio once said. "You look forward to it like a birthday party when you're a kid. You think something wonderful is going to happen."

In 2023, Major League Baseball experienced record attendance — nearly 71 million ticket holders or an average of 31,194 fans per game (that’s 28 teams with 81 home games). Opening Day saw an average of 36,107 attendees per stadium.

Cincinnati, home of the oldest franchise in baseball, holds the annual Findlay Market Parade to celebrate Opening Day. The tradition goes back to the 1800s. This is an old-time parade with players, floats, bands and local businesses marking the end of winter (better than the groundhog in Pennsylvania, in my humble opinion) and the start of baseball. Last year, more than 130,000 fans attended the parade.

In St. Louis, the Cardinals mark the start of the season when the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales take a lap around the stadium. I’ve seen these horses in person, and they are majestic.

One tradition that moves from city to city is the unfurling of the Championship Banner. The Texas Rangers, who won the World Series this past season, get to lord it over all the visiting teams this year.