Johnny Hodapp

I can’t remember what I was looking for, but I came across this cartoon in an old Enquirer (or maybe it was the Post or Times-Star) a while back while doing some research in the newspaper morgue:

Though it appeared 20 years before I was born, I think it sums up the feeling Cincinnatians have long held about the first game of the baseball season: Opening at home isn’t just a tradition — it’s our birthright as fans of baseball’s first professional team. As John Erardi and Greg Rhodes wrote in Opening Day: Celebrating Cincinnati’s Baseball Holiday:

No other major league baseball team is granted the privilege of opening at home except the Cincinnati Reds. This is a custom of scheduling that Reds fans believe is probably found somewhere in he U.S. Constitution, or at the very least, in the hallowed rules of Major League Baseball.

Unfortunately, Erardi and Rhodes then go about debunking all of the myths surrounding the Reds’ entitlement to the home opener.

It was even widely believed that the Reds were somehow guaranteed to play the first game of the year — hence the first pitch of the Reds home opener would also be the first pitch of the baseball season.

That tradition — if it ever really was one — came crashing down on Opening Day 1985, when two American League games started before the Reds could get off a first pitch. Reds fans were outraged.

This year, the Reds didn’t open on the same day or the same week — or even the same continent — as the major league opener. (The Red Sox and Athletics played a two-game set in Japan last week.) And the North American opener took place Sunday night in Washington, where the Nationals hosted the Braves. On ESPN, Jon Miller and Joe Morgan made a super-big deal about that game being the “Presidential Opener” because George W. Bush threw out the first pitch. (The Reds had Hamilton County Commissioner Todd Portune.)

But there’s still something special about Opening Day in Cincinnati: The parade, the pageantry, the sellout crowds, the unofficial city holiday.

Roll out the Red carpet!