Going to try something a little different. Anyone who knows me knows that my favorite sports team on the planet is the Atlanta Braves, but I don’t write about them very often on the site. So this is just going to be a little column about what I was doing and my thoughts about the course of the game.

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been base-ball.

I post that quote before the first game of every season on my social media feeds. I don’t know if the original script calls for baseball to be hyphened like that, but James Earl Jones says those two syllables like there’s a hyphen there, and who am I to argue with James Earl Jones?

Naturally, I’m still working from home and the first pitch of this game was around noon, Pacific Time. Generally a Braves game will start well into the afternoon for me, which I find pretty ideal as I try to get stuff done near the end of my day. It was also in the 70’s in San Francisco today, which is pretty rare even in the summer, much less on April 1. It was significantly colder in Philadelphia, with temperatures in the upper-40’s/low-50’s and a stiff 20 mile an hour wind. The players, just recently in Florida, looked as cold as the conditions.

I finally had a gap between meetings during which I could actually watch some of the middle innings, which was just in time to see Pablo Sandoval crush a changeup from Aaron Nola. That was no Citizens Bank cheapie – it was well into the second deck, and one of the hardest hit balls the Panda has had in years. (And due to the conditions, it had to be – almost every other fly ball was affected by the stiff wind.) Even better, it tied the game. The Braves eventually lost in the 10th, but that shot will be one of those we look back on the end-of-year reel in late September and go “man, he crushed that ball”.

The conditions were crummy, but not crummy enough to necessitate the backup opening day, so there’s no game until Saturday. I put together the schedule that you can see on the right last night, and boy howdy we have a lot of nationally televised games this season. That’s what coming within a game of the World Series will do for you.