Things to do with the earlier angst remain unchanged, but the rest of the day has gotten better.

The Mets won their home opener in their traditionally nail-biting way with five runs scored in the bottom of the ninth. Two wins in a row is a streak, right?

And the DC Film Festival called to say I’d been accepted as a volunteer. So I’ll be one of the friendly faces you see at E Street and Regal next Tuesday and Wednesday. And the perks include a free regular screening and a free ticket to the final movie and party! The final movie, Ladies in Lavender, is one of the ones I really wanted to see, too, so I’m particularly excited.

But easily a double, possibly stretching to a triple.

Rudi and I just returned home from a sneak preview of Fever Pitch, the new Drew Barrymore-Jimmy Fallon baseball flick. I didn’t go in expecting The Natural, but I was hoping for something better than Major League II.

Drew plays a workaholic’ish (if she were a real workaholic, she wouldn’t come to the game at all, but then we wouldn’t have a movie plot) businesswoman. Jimmy plays a high school math teacher and a die-hard Sox fan. You know… crazy. You can see where this is all going, and it doesn’t stray from the predictable storyline. There are no knuckleballs or curveballs (a couple of screwball moments, but you expect those with these stars); pretty much you’re just going to get the straight fastball the whole way. And I think the audience is going to be okay with that in general.

For people who don’t enjoy the prosaic romantic comedy (Sam?), you aren’t going to find this anything unexpected and I wouldn’t recommend shelling out more than a matinee/discount ticket price for it.

But for folks who sometimes wonder if their current obsession may be driving their daily life, I’d say you’ll find something in here.

Fever Pitch aims to be a sweet, romantic comedy and is just that.

—-

Best baseball movies of my lifetime:

The Natural
Field of Dreams
Bull Durham
A League of Their Own

(I haven’t seen any of the earlier baseball films, but they’re on my list. Any recommendations for which ones to see first?)

Congratulations to Baylor, who won their first national basketball championship last night.

They are the first team in more than a decade to win the big dance during their first trip to the Final Four — and only the fourth team in history (either men’s or women’s) to do so.

Today is the one day a year that the women get equal national coverage with the men in college sports.

I was born in the Title IX era. No one ever suggested that girls shouldn’t play sports, so I grew up playing track, volleyball, basketball, and softball. My dad and I played catch in the backyard (and one memorable time in our elementary school playground when I launched a borrowed softball onto the building’s roof). My high school softball team won the state title twice.

I come from a state where our sports stars are women. Rebecca. Nykesha. Jen. Shea. Sveta. Sue. Diana. Ann. In our little corner of the world, these are the one-named wonders.

In Connecticut, women’s sports aren’t relegated to the back page or the box scores of the daily papers. Not only do they make the front page of the sports section, but they also periodically make the front page of the whole paper or lead the 11 p.m. newscast.

These days I generally have to hunt if I want to find out how the women’s teams have done. Even the WNBA coverage in the Post is lacking. But not today.

Today I — and the rest of the country — salute the Title IX generation and the Baylor squad who showed once again that women can play spectacular games.

There’s something vaguely comforting about the Mets dropping their season opener to the Reds — in the bottom of the ninth.

Some people (read, Yankees fans) seem to be under the impression that winning connotes a quality baseball team. But they aren’t right, which is why the rest of us think less of them. They like to believe it’s because we’re jealous of their team’s success. But the truth is we actually like being left on the edge of our seats night after night — will we win the game after all or will we blow it in some spectacularly horrific way? That’s real baseball. The Yankees play scripted, sanitized baseball, custom-made for television.

Sox fans (and most Yankee fans, too — they only seem to suffer this illness as it relates to their own team) will tell you that the Sox-Yankees games of last year’s postseason were much more interesting than the World Series. And they’d be right. Because those games were lacking drama, were lacking the nail-biting angst of “will they or won’t they?”

My Mets may prevail this year or they may not — but they will never be boring or predictable — and I will love ever minute on the edge of my seat.

The baseball season kicks off today with the Red Sox-Yankees game tonight, and Rudi and I are celebrating Opening Day with a trip to RFK (in an hour) to see the Nats and the Mets face off in a final scrimmage before they play their first official games tomorrow.

I can’t believe how exciting it is to have baseball start up again. There’s something so optimistic about the beginning of a season, when your team (no matter how poor last season’s record) has just as good a shot as another to win the pennant and the World Series.

Baseball brings back hope after a dark winter, just when nature is starting to send out tendrils and shoots. It’s a way of reminding us to be glad we’re alive.

In honor of that seasonal optimism, I give you the first poem I ever memorized. (more…)

It’s been a long time since I experienced the dichotomy of wanting to hurry, hurry, hurry and finish a book while simultaneously wanting to slow down and have the book last forever. But Summerland, Michael Chabon’s baseball fantasy novel (as opposed to a fantasy baseball novel — a very different concept), gave me just that reaction. (more…)