Opening Day! How Baseball is Wrapped in American History and Tradition

The game is so much more than the players and a big book of rules

Greg Carroll,

AARP Experience Counts

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Published March 07, 2024

baseball players at yankee stadium on a sunny day

The New York Yankees stand during the national anthem before their Opening Day game against the San Francisco Giants at Yankee Stadium on March 30, 2023 in Bronx, New York.

Jim McIsaac/Getty Images

My Dad was a baseball fanatic, spending his youth at the Polo Grounds watching the New York Giants. Growing up on Long Island, one of my earliest memories is going with him to a Yankees game. Maybe that’s why baseball touches my soul.

Baseball has paralleled American history. It was played during the Civil War, two World Wars (many of the sport’s best players joined the military after Pearl Harbor), women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement and the explosion of modern technology. One of Thomas Edison’s first displays of the usefulness of the lightbulb was a night ball game in Massachusetts.

It is a game of history and tradition. To quote the character Terence Mann in the movie Field of Dreams: “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steam rollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”

For some, baseball season seems to go on forever. Others hope it never ends.

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"You always get a special kick on Opening Day, no matter how many you go through," Yankees legend and Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio once said. "You look forward to it like a birthday party when you're a kid. You think something wonderful is going to happen."

In 2023, Major League Baseball experienced record attendance — nearly 71 million ticket holders or an average of 31,194 fans per game (that’s 28 teams with 81 home games). Opening Day saw an average of 36,107 attendees per stadium.

Cincinnati, home of the oldest franchise in baseball, holds the annual Findlay Market Parade to celebrate Opening Day. The tradition goes back to the 1800s. This is an old-time parade with players, floats, bands and local businesses marking the end of winter (better than the groundhog in Pennsylvania, in my humble opinion) and the start of baseball. Last year, more than 130,000 fans attended the parade.

In St. Louis, the Cardinals mark the start of the season when the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales take a lap around the stadium. I’ve seen these horses in person, and they are majestic.

One tradition that moves from city to city is the unfurling of the Championship Banner. The Texas Rangers, who won the World Series this past season, get to lord it over all the visiting teams this year.

Another tradition that dates to 1900 is the U.S. president throwing out the first pitch. William Taft initiated this tradition at a Washington Senators' game. I attended the Washington Nationals game in 2005 when President George W. Bush threw out the first pitch to welcome baseball back to Washington, D.C.

This wasn’t his most momentous first pitch, however. Bush also threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium on Oct. 3,2001, just weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. First responders and families of first responders who were killed that day attended.

Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith led a group trying to make Opening Day a national holiday, collecting signatures through the “We the People” petitioning platform.

“There are 22 million people who have, at some point in time, played hooky from work or school, so it’s already an unofficial holiday,” Smith once said.

Baseball is so much more than 18 players on the field and a big book of rules. It’s a shared experience of millions — and not just in the United States. Although it is America’s pastime, professional leagues operate in Latin American and Asia.

For the ball players, it’s a chance to get paid to do something they love. For the fans, it’s a chance to get together for a few hours of hope and entertainment, punctuated by wins, losses and random super-human feats.

I was once asked if a time machine could take me anywhere, what would I choose? My answer was easy: 1950s New York to catch a ballgame with my Dad. I can’t think of a better way to spend an afternoon.

Share your experience: What's your favorite part of baseball season? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

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Greg Carroll started his career in marketing and advertising, writing ad copy for several small agencies and private companies after college. He spends his time writing policies, training courses and the occasional article for a federal agency newsletter. At some point, he hopes to get back to the novel he and a friend never finished writing a decade and a half ago.

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