Opening Day

The Welcome Distraction

Mar 26, 2026

Fenway Park grounds crew prepares the mound before Opening Day, 1958.

Americans found themselves in search of distraction. As the nation dragged itself into another foreign war, it seemed as though the long-festering disunion between countrymen might really spill out into the open. But as summer approached, on a warm June afternoon, Americans found the diversion they had long sought on the green grass of the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. There, the New York Nine defeated the Knickerbocker Club in the first recorded baseball game.

It was 1846. Back then, the new war was with Mexico, to expand slavery’s reach into the West. For decades, the debate over whether the United States should expand or abolish slavery had continued and with President James K. Polk’s entry into Mexico, its expansion seemed inevitable. That spring, as the war began, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Mexico will poison us.” In Illinois, a 37-year-old lawyer named Abraham Lincoln launched a campaign for the U.S. House to oppose a conflict that would eventually lead to the Civil War fifteen years later.

But around New York, the sensation called baseball broke ground in the national consciousness. About a month after that first recorded game, in The Brooklyn Eagle, Walt Whitman wrote, “In our sun-down perambulations of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing ‘base,’ a certain game of ball…Let us go forth awhile and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms…The game of ball is glorious.”

In the 180 years that followed, the glorious game of ball remained America’s great distraction. By the time the Civil War came, baseball had emerged as “The National Game,” as soldiers from both the North and the South played it on wide-open plains, in grass-covered fields and on abandoned farms across a nation that was redefining what it meant to be an American even as it split in two.

By 1869, the first professional team was created: the Cincinnati Red Stockings, as baseball began to take its modern form. Seven years later—as the gains of the Civil War became undone with the corrupt election of 1876 and Reconstruction’s end in the South—the National League was established. By 1892, the same year Ellis Island opened, Benjamin Harrison became the first president to attend a game. By 1903, as the Wright brothers took flight in Kitty Hawk, the Boston Pilgrims played the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first World Series. And in the summer of 1914, as the First World War broke out in Europe, a two-way player named Babe Ruth made his debut for the Boston Red Sox.

America and its game grew together.

During the Second World War, Major League Baseball continued, as the game served as a national distraction for players and fans alike. A month after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt wrote to Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, “I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going. There will be fewer people unemployed and everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before. And that means that they ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than before.”

After the war, baseball continued to be at the center of the national conversation, when Jackie Robinson broke the sport’s color barrier on April 15, 1947, a story I wrote about last April. Two years later, baseball moved from domestic policy to diplomacy when an 11-game tour led by Lefty O’Doul and the San Francisco Seals in Japan helped normalize relations with the United States. General Douglas MacArthur, who sanctioned the junket that came just four years after the war’s end, called it “the greatest piece of diplomacy ever,” a fact made even more remarkable today because the best player in baseball—who may well end up being the best player in the history of the sport—is Shohei Ohtani, the Los Angeles Dodgers superstar who still plays for the Japanese national team.

Through wars, earthquakes and tragedies, baseball has remained America’s outlet for healing, its national excuse to pay attention to something other than reality. Never was that truer than on October 30, 2001—just weeks after 9/11—when President George W. Bush took to the mound for the ceremonial first pitch before Game 3 of the World Series between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the New York Yankees. It was the first game of the series in the Bronx, just a few miles north of the still-smoldering ash and bent steel that marked the spot where the Twin Towers used to stand. Bush said later, recounting Yankee Stadium that night, “I’ve been to conventions and rallies and speeches: I’ve never felt anything so powerful and emotions so strong, and the collective will of the crowd so evident.” In an FDNY quarter-zip that covered up a flak jacket, Bush readied himself on the mound, 60 feet and 6 inches away, and threw a perfect strike. It was the height of his presidency. America had permission to heal.

And today—on Opening Day of the 2026 season—baseball remains the national distraction. A chance, for once, to ignore the noise that dominates the everyday humdrum of conversation and focus only on the next pitch. Because never has that distraction been more valuable. The game’s very nature is a reminder to slow down and take a moment to appreciate the grass beneath our feet and the sun shining down on our faces.

It is the greatest game not because of the thrill of victory but because of the lessons of defeat. It humbles its superheroes and Little Leaguers alike. When Ted Williams became the last player to hit over .400 in 1941, he failed to get a hit 60% of the time. Last year, when Aaron Judge won his 3rd AL MVP in four years, he hit 53 home runs, meaning that in the 679 trips he took to the plate in 2025, there were 626 other times he didn’t homer and failed to impress the child who came just to see him. In 2020, amid the pandemic-shortened season, Shohei Ohtani hit .190 in his third year, as it appeared that his career might turn out to be a disappointment. (He’s won the MVP in four of the five subsequent seasons.)

Baseball remains our game, but it is much more than that. It is a clarion call for hope, for wonder, and for possibility. A warren to protect from the winter wind. A daily American Aeneid, unfolding not verse by verse but pitch by pitch. It is the sizzle of the grill and a melting bead of ice cream running down a child’s face in the hot summer sun. It is the tang of lemonade on your lips and the pop of a bubble that got too big. It is the feeling of a sunburn when you sit down to dinner and the chirping of crickets on a summer night you hope never ends. It is the call of your father’s voice, resonant once more, calling you in from the porch as you reply, “One more at bat!”

It is…Opening Day.

American Times with Tim Barnicle

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