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Opening day. All you have to do is say the words and you feel the shutters thrown wide, the room air out, the light pour in. In baseball, no other day is so pure with possibility. No scores yet, no losses, no blame or disappointment. No hangover, at least until the game's over.

Opening Day was a big thing. I came to a lot of Orioles games. I grew up a couple blocks from here, so I was always coming down to the stadium. I always made it down for Opening Day until I was a little bit older and I had ball. But when I was younger, I always missed school.

Baseball's Opening Day is full of time-honored traditions: the President throws out the first ball, the Cubs' starting pitcher walks away with a 54.00 ERA, the Royals get mathematically eliminated from the pennant race.

Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday's success or put its failures behind and start over again. That's the way life is, with a new game every day, and that's the way baseball is.

You always get a special kick on opening day, no matter how many you go through. You look forward to it like a birthday party when you're a kid. You think something wonderful is going to happen.

For many in baseball September is a month of stark contrast with April, when everyone had dared to hope. If baseball is a lot like life, as pundits declare, it is because life is more about losing than winning.

Baseball has better opening days and All-Star Games than the N.F.L. does. Ours stink.

It really gets into your system. All baseball players have this internal clock around February when it starts to kick in and the juices start to flow. I think underestimated how much I was going to miss it.

I'd give a year of my life if I could hit a homerun on opening day of this great new park.

I've been playing baseball since I was 5 or 6 years old. I've been on a schedule, pretty much, since I was in eighth, ninth grade. I look forward to not doing that.