Baseball before sunrise is a beautiful thing

The 2008 season opened three days ago, with games broadcast on ESPN2 at around 6 a.m. That’s right, in the morning. Apparently Major League Baseball decided that Japanese fans like baseball more than American ones (arguably true) and decided that the first game of the new year should be played in the land of the rising sun. If I sound like I’m bitter, it’s only because I woke up at 5:45 on a day when I had a 15-minute oral presentation on Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal.”

When the game kicked off, however, my sleep-deprived catatonia was still several hours off on the horizon. The season’s first pitch was thrown out by Joe Blanton of the Oakland A’s. Blanton, a rotund righthander best known as one of Billy Beane’s first-round picks in Michael Lewis’ “Moneyball,” is arguably more popular in New York than California, thanks to the frequent trade rumors that never fail to prematurely send him to the Yankees. The only reason I know about him is my obsession with fantasy baseball, and even then it’s only because he’s on my “Don’t Own” list.

I definitely didn’t tune in to watch Blanton. But I was excited to see the supposed star of the night, Red Sox starter Daisuke Matsuzaka. As the commentators no doubt told the audience several times, Matsuzaka has been a legend in his home country since he was in high school and participated in Japan’s national baseball tournament. The precocious pitcher threw a 17-inning game the day after throwing a shutout victory, and came back to throw a no-hitter in the finals.

Matsuzaka, however, looked terrible in the first inning. After getting a quick out, he grooved a fastball to Oakland second baseman Mark Ellis. Who the hell is Mark Ellis? He’s basically David Eckstein minus 10 shots of concentrated caffeine. The thought of “Dice-K” — Matsuzaka’s catchy anglicized nickname — giving up a home run to Mark Ellis is slightly harder to wrap my head around than the idea of Alec Baldwin getting upstaged by a random Broadway actor named Gary.

And it didn’t get better after that. Matsuzaka walked rookie three-hole hitter Daric Barton, hit Jack Cust — after receiving that gift from the Sox, Cust would pay the team back by striking out in his next four at-bats — and then walked Emil Brown (Brown, like Cust, would return the favor in the ninth inning, but more on that later).

Thankfully for Boston, most of the A’s don’t actually know how to play baseball, and Matsuzaka escaped with only two runs allowed.

After a somewhat eventful first inning, the game settled down, and the fantasy baseball took over. My friend from Yale owns Matsuzaka, so I sent him an offer of Micah Owings along with Matsuzaka’s current projected line of an 18.00 ERA and 4.00 walks and hits per inning pitched. Somehow, I didn’t think that was getting accepted anytime soon.

No one scored in the next four innings, and a friend and I mostly sat around joking about how half of Oakland’s roster was in the minors last season. In about an hour and a half, we saw two or three other human beings, all of them on their way to the shower and giving us odd looks. Now I understood how all those kids who watched soccer or tennis in the early-morning hours felt.

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Of course, with my luck, as soon as we left for breakfast, something actually started happening. The sixth inning featured two runs, one on each side, and a plateful of pineapple for me. By the time we got back, the score was 4-3 and Matsuzaka was out of the game. Oddly enough, no one was leaving the stadium in the typical seventh-inning exodus in order to avoid the rush. Weird; they really might be better fans than us.

In the end, however, the game was decided in the final innings. Boston rightfielder Brandon Moss tied the game in the top of the ninth with a home run against Oakland closer Huston Street, and Sox slugger Manny Ramirez gave his team the lead in the top of the tenth. Ramirez’s runs held up, despite a shaky inning from Boston’s ace closer, Jonathan Papelbon.

All in all, it was an interesting game. The defending champions started out 1-0, and the worst team in the league started out 0-1, but it was a lot closer than I expected. My GPA took its first sport-related hit of 2008 thanks to that presentation. America’s pastime got outsourced. The early risers of Whitman College looked with disdain on the two burnouts who watched baseball early in the morning instead of doing something productive. And, after a long and cold winter, baseball finally returned.

I am so happy.