Baseball's Back

After a fairly entertaining World Baseball Classic and a spring training that seemed to go on forever, baseball finally returned for real last night as the Braves beat the Phillies to start the regular season. Today's the first full day of games, with the Yankees starting the season against the Orioles in just a few minutes. It feels good to have the game back, I've had some fun watching things like the football playoffs and having those three hours every night, but I can't say any other sport makes me feel the way baseball does.

I don't have too much to say about this Yankee team. They should be a lot better than last year, with the additions of CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira especially, which they need to be competitive in the game's best division. I've seen too many people thinking that those two will only replace the production of Mike Mussina and Jason Giambi, but they're overlooking how much else went wrong last season that probably won't happen this time. Almost everybody who got hurt is looking healthy now, and it seems like they might be missing Alex Rodriguez for less time than initially expected. This spring was a complete mess of controversy for him, but even at less than full health he's a dominant offensive force for this team.

Sabathia's first start begins shortly, although I won't be liveblogging the game for reasons I won't get into. I do intend to blog his first home start though, which will happen to be the first official game played in the new Yankee Stadium. They played a couple exhibition games against the Cubs a couple days ago, and while some of the camera positions seemed less than ideal, they have time to fix that, and it's a really nice looking park. The ball seemed to really fly out when hitters got a hold of it, but it remains to be seen whether it will be more of a hitter's park than the old stadium or it was just a fluke. Either way, I'm excited to see what this team does this year in it's new home.