Drink Up, Baseball’s Back
In college, all you need to properly celebrate America’s Pastime is sunflower seeds, alcohol, uneasy silence and a pinch of ingenuity.
By John Miles, Santa Fe College
Next Monday (April 4th) is Opening Day for the MLB, and it might come as a surprise to you that the baseball season’s first day is actually kind of a big deal to a lot of old people.
In fact, it’s one of the biggest and best marketed of all the opening days across sports. For this reason, along with the fact that it only comes once a year, it’s important that you learn how to fully enjoy all that MLB Opening Day has to offer.
First and foremost, you will not attend any of your classes. Games start in the morning and end at night, so you will have to get a good night’s sleep.
Since you’ll be busy doing absolutely nothing all day, you need to be prepared. Be it dorm modifications or culinary preparation, here is a list of things that need to be done come April 4th.
Obtain the adult beverage of your choice.
We’re going to start off with the most important suggestion of the whole list.
Get your favorite adult beverage, and lots of it. If that beverage isn’t available, remember that for opening day, it’s quantity over quality.
Some of you may need extremely high quantity to consider yourselves even the slightest bit entertained. This is perfectly acceptable. It’s opening day. Drink away, Hoss.
Invite a maximum of three friends.
You’re all basically amateur sports broadcasters, and if you have too many people talking at once, your underground coverage of the games is going to be completely ruined.
Do yourself a favor and keep the attendance to a minimum.
Besides, do you really expect to find more than three people that want to sit around and watch baseball all day long? Once again, the beer will come in handy here, now being utilized as a sort of bartering tool.
Chew sunflower seeds.
Whether you’re on the field or in the stands, sunflower seeds are the staple crop of baseball. They come in 2 for $1 packets at the gas station, and they shall always remain 2 for 1$ for as long as the game of baseball is played.
Barbeque and ranch are the best flavors; don’t trust anyone who tells you to get dill pickle. Those are very bad people. They are not the kind of individuals you ought to be associating with.
Make sure to set lineups in all fifteen of your fantasy leagues.
Fantasy baseball is probably the least popular of all the fantasy sports because it goes on for over half the damn year, which means that after the first month, nobody is going to be paying attention.
So naturally, if you want to win all you have to do is do a good job for the first month and you’ll be unstoppable.
Also, since you’re only going to be setting your lineup for four weeks, the natural tendency is to sign up for a ridiculous amount of leagues just to see what happens with them. Kind of like a rich person on Wall Street.
At some point, tune into the Chicago White Sox broadcast.
You’ll thank me later. “Hawk” Harrelson calls the White Sox games, and he’s quite possibly the most biased, most terrible, most hilarious sports broadcaster in the history of sports. The man is a legend in his own right.
Hawk is so committed to his craft that he’s said he won’t retire and that he wants to die in the booth. If you aren’t a White Sox fan, there’s a decent chance you’ll hate his guts by the end of the first at-bat.
Obtain as many TVs as possible.
There will be about ten games going on at the same time, so if you have to move around a few things, don’t be shy.
You’re converting your dorm into a man-cave. This is your final step on the road to masculinity. Do you want to be a sissy your whole life? No!
Get up off your lazy tail, drag your bed out of the room and replace it with the Great Wall of Television.
Also, purchase a subscription to MLB.tv. If you need to get rid of your life insurance to free up some funds, that’s alright. It’s a simple question of priorities.
No girlfriends allowed.
The only reason for a guy to be watching baseball is because he used to play it and thus can enjoy watching the game, but the only reason for a girl to watch baseball is that they like what they see—and no, I’m not referring to an appreciation for the sport.
So the reason for not having your girlfriend over to watch with you is two-fold: 1) They’ll keep pestering you to “get up and do something with your life” (what do they know anyway?); and 2) There’s no way you can compete with a professional athlete in terms of attractiveness. If you can’t beat them, pretend they don’t exist.
Enjoy the day in which you will watch more baseball games than you will for the entire remainder of the season.
If you are anything like me you’re a fan, sure, but you shouldn’t be bothered to watch more games than the number of fingers and toes you’ve got. Or to allude to a previous point, you shouldn’t have to watch more games than the number of beers currently in your refrigerator.
If you responded “I have zero beers right now,” congratulations! You are in luck—no baseball for you. But if you do have beer, there’s nothing else you can do but (in “Hawk” Harrelson’s words) to “Sit back, relax, and strap it down.”
Opening day happens once a year, just like getting your engine oil changed or performing maintenance work on your Keurig: Like it or not, you just have to do it.
Be an American for once. If you can’t, just pretend to be one. Get enough beer in you and you might even remember that the thing on TV that you’re watching is actually America’s National Pastime.
