It’s that time of year. The 2025 Major League Baseball opening day is just over a month away, and baseball fans are pumped.
It’s that time of year. The 2025 Major League Baseball opening day is just over a month away, and baseball fans are pumped. For over a century, baseball fans trembled in anticipation as the day neared. Even players are counting down the days. Yankees Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio once stated, “You look forward to it like a birthday party when you’re a kid. You think something wonderful is going to happen.”
Other sports have season openers, but baseball’s is unique. It signifies more than baseball. It tells you the brutal winter months are coming to an end. Spring is to be upon us; then summer. It’s been nearly 150 years since the first recorded MLB opening day game was played, and baseball has endured an extraordinary change.
The first recorded MLB opening day game was played way back on April 22, 1876. The Boston Red Stockings took on the Philadelphia Athletics in Philadelphia and beat them 6-5. This was a time before cell phones or video cameras. The game was photographed and followed closely by scorekeepers, similar to how broadcasters follow games now. But even though the first-ever opening-day game was played in Philadelphia, why do the Reds get the home honors each year? Why are they associated with the season’s opener?
Cincinnati has always been a proud baseball town, and each baseball season, it’s likely the Cincinnati opener would be a home one. So, why Cincinnati? This answer is not exactly clear, nor is it easy to answer. It has several possibilities. It’s been long speculated that since the Reds were the first professional baseball team, as the Red Stockings, the franchise naturally got the honor of opening at home on the first game of the season each season, since 1876. The Reds have a team historian named Greg Rhodes. He believes it was “a combination of geography, opportunism, and money.” But the true answer may be lost to time. Perhaps we’re right when we boast about being the first professional team.
There have been some wild feats and events that occurred on Opening Day in different seasons in the MLB. In 1940, 21-year-old Bob Feller was in his fifth year pitching in the major leagues. He was the fastest pitcher of his time. They didn’t have radar guns at the time to determine pitch speeds, so they had the pitcher throw his pitch and someone rode alongside the ball on a motorcycle. The speed on the speedometer determined the speed of the pitch. In 1939, Feller participated in this tiresome experiment and his fastball was clocked at 104 MPH against a police motorcycle, though at the time it was 98.6 MPH. Later updated techniques increased the speed. There’s a great documentary on this part of the game called, “Fastball.” A year later, in 1940, the Cleveland Indians put Feller on the mound to start on opening day. He would throw a gem, no-hitting the White Sox in their home ballpark in chilly 35-degree weather. The future Hall of Famer would go on to shut out three teams on seven opening-day starts in his career.
Going to 1909, Red Ames was nearly as successful but became known as “Calamity,” meaning a sudden disaster. In his case, he lost a depressing opening-day start for the Giants, when he held the Dodgers, then placed in Brooklyn, hitless for nine and a third innings before losing the no-hitter and ultimately the game. Despite this loss, the Giants continued to open with him over the next few seasons. In the next two seasons, Red Ames would once again take a no-hitter to the middle of the game before losing both of them.