Lincicome: Opening Day lures the opening question out into the open

Listen up class. Today’s question is Why Baseball?

Think of baseball like a cucumber sandwich. Just when you believe you’ve got it digested, here it comes again.

Opening Day 2026 was not noticeably different from other Opening Days. Things happened, things didn’t. New stars debuted. Old stars lingered. The continuity is reassuring.

If this Opening Day was not locally uplifting — the Cubs routed at home, the Sox swinging and missing in Milwaukee — the season is long and patience is both traditional and encouraged. After all, there was Anthony Rizzo at Wrigley Field to remind us a decade later that faith can pay.

With a Cubs lineup vaguely familiar and the White Sox players barely used, the summer promises to tease and torment; nothing new there.

Results may now be fairly expected, old promises kept, new possibilities shown, because if baseball is a game of patience, it is also a game of trust. Patience and trust in Chicago baseball is ever new, ever old, ever with us.

No other American sport has so much of our common signature as does baseball. No sports arguments are more passionate than those over baseball and over baseball’s place in our lives.

It is possible to tolerate other sports, but only baseball can be loved.

Football is mock war, violent and frightening when done well, goofy and sad when done badly, but always impossible to enjoy without guilt.

Basketball is frantic, repetitive and contested in windowless arenas full of competing aromas.

Hockey is an alley fight on skates where it is easy to lose sight of both the object of the game and the puck.

Soccer is … well, soccer is somebody else’s problem.

To believe these arguments you also must believe that you can’t follow any sport except baseball without suffering from either neurosis or emphysema.

There may be something to that.

When baseball has the most intense grip on the national consciousness, it is only because it is a cure for the frenzy of ordinary life, an anchor, thoroughly pointless and completely irreplaceable.

Even as sports seasons have piled upon top of each other like discarded laundry, baseball keeps its order, the best reason to be outdoors in spring, summer and fall.

Steadfast in all this chaos has remained baseball. It is the most legitimate of seasons, contained within one calendar year, still resisting the urge to dilute itself into allowing half the teams into playoffs, if already deluded into accepting the notion that more is more.

Even so, with wild cards and layered playoffs, games in April really do mean as much as games in September.

Baseball is the game it always has been, even with robot umpires and replays and pitch clocks and extra inning ghost runners. It is still played in comparatively wide-open spaces, with the same equipment and under the same rules, now irretrievably into its second century.

The very tediousness that ought to be working against baseball is its salvation.

Baseball can be thoroughly boring, but there is a generous grace in its pace. It is not slow as much as leisurely. The 1-2-3 inning has a remarkable order about it, geometrically perfect, like the circle.

It is the celebration of the individual and the confirmation of the team, the improbable denying the impossible. The most persistent difficulty with baseball is also its greatest beauty.

Unlike football, where action is guaranteed each time the ball is snapped, baseball offers only the motion of the pitcher’s arm with no guarantee that the batter is going to even swing at the ball, never mind hit it.

Almost anything that happens in baseball is a surprise. And you have to be paying attention at all times or you miss it, although technology does keep its own library.

The remarkable thing is that the pace of baseball is appealingly restful. There is a wonderful appeal to entertainment that does not bombard the brain with a climax every other second, ignoring sports book signage and giant outfield TV screens.

Baseball allows you to breathe, which may be why it became the national pastime in the first place.

Why baseball? Don’t ask.