What I’ll miss most about Opening Day is sharing it with my father

I love Opening Day. There is something about the blank canvas. About possibility. All the spring training niceties — best shape of their lives and the injured who were way ahead of schedule — have folded into the reality of Game 1. Game 162 seems far away. Opening Day allows a return to familiar faces …

I love Opening Day.

There is something about the blank canvas. About possibility. All the spring training niceties — best shape of their lives and the injured who were way ahead of schedule — have folded into the reality of Game 1. Game 162 seems far away.

Opening Day allows a return to familiar faces and rhythms. Old jokes and old friends renewed. The start of a story we all predict, but have no true idea where it is going, unless you — for example — knew a lot more about Gio Urshela at this time last year or were already anticipating Marcus Stroman in a Mets uniform.

If all had worked out perfectly — if no one had heard of COVID-19 — then I was going to be in the Citi Field pressbox Thursday, shortly after 1 p.m., Jacob deGrom throwing the first pitch against the defending champ Nationals. Could deGrom begin toward a third straight NL Cy Young? Could the Nats repeat without Anthony Rendon? Could Pete Alonso duplicate a 2019 both awe-inspiring and eye-opening?

For me, the best part would be back in my Manhattan apartment afterward. I would call my dad in Queens and share another Opening Day.

Even as his health has faded, my dad’s love for baseball has not. Sometimes he cannot remember what he had for breakfast. But we did a quiz the other day and he was rattling off the NL champions of the 1950s like they were the names of his children.

Baseball has always been a place my dad and I can meet. Our views on politics or religion may not align, but he has me at hello when he starts talking about Stan Musial’s swing, which he was doing just the other night. Or when he was explaining that Sandy Koufax just had to pitch Game 1 on his imaginary all-time team, but man was it hard not to make it Pedro Martinez.

My dad’s health has been in descent since my mom passed away on the final regular-season day of 1998 — me in a press box in Atlanta. First, his heart broke and then a lot of his body followed. Two heart ailments. A lung removed for cancer. Emphysema. A lot of debilitating physical issues, none more so than spinal stenosis — I shared quite a few conversations about the condition with David Wright through the years.

My dad drove a truck and lugged soda and beer and later meat out of the Hunts Point Market for 50 years. He would take me on the truck every other Saturday when I was a boy and — radio-free — we would talk baseball. He would leave weekdays well before I woke and would still pull the bat bag out of the car after school and hit fungo grounders to me at Canarsie Park. He gave me a work ethic and baseball, so really I owe a whole career to him.

In 2011, he fell very ill just before Opening Day. I checked him into White Plains Hospital, he had pneumonia and a small blockage in his neck and he ebbed better with medicine and care and because he was my dad — tough and more interested in you than him — he implored me to go to Opening Day, Tigers-Yankees, Verlander-Sabathia. I did. Largely because I knew I would come back to the hospital to share the day with him.

Time has only ravaged his body more in the years since, even as defiant as ever he has continued to insist on living alone. But when the ramifications of coronavirus worsened I realized that even after filling his fridge for two weeks, he would never stay in and care for himself. And his respiratory issues made this extremely dangerous for him. I could not leave the guy who gave me everything — those fungo grounders still in his work boots — alone.

My blessing was to have a great girlfriend with a house in Sag Harbor. I was able to relocate him and my sons and isolate him in the house from everyone but me, just in case someone was asymptomatic. It is an abnormal, uncomfortable time, but I eat dinner with him every night and, yep, we talk baseball. We really did do his all-time team the other day and he was finding a place for Pete Rose no matter what — “Joel, I don’t care what else he did, I can’t leave a guy with 4,000 hits off my team.”

And of all the crushing items about not having an Opening Day, not having an Opening Day to share with him is at the top of my list. Because as much as English, baseball is our language. We always have the words for each other there.

So I will dream of an Opening Day in the near future. That I will be able to keep my dad and my boys healthy and safe and that everyone reading these words will have the same fortune with their families and friends.

Someday soon I hope my dad and I are talking about deGrom and Gerrit Cole and Alonso and Aaron Judge. I hope soon we are speaking that great language again to one another — baseball.

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