What We Saw Across MLB On Opening Day: Orioles Excite, Ohtani Embraced, A’s Abandoned

Three-time MVP Mike Trout hit the first home run. Former Cy Young winner Corbin Burnes delivered the season’s first truly great pitching performance. The upstart Baltimore Orioles got the first win, bolstering a city aching from recent tragedy.

And that was all just in the first game.

Thursday was Opening Day in Major League Baseball, an unofficial sporting holiday of hope and possibility. Technically, the baseball season started a week ago on the other side of the world, with a two-game series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres in Seoul, South Korea. But Opening Day as a concept only happens when the season gets started across the league, from Miami to Seattle, for preseason favorites and postseason longshots.

In the standings, one game out of 162 is barely a drop in the bucket, but it signals the start of something universal and relatable. Green grass. Cheering crowds. The end of winter and the embrace of spring. A tradition that has connected generations — from Babe Ruth to Shohei Ohtani — for more than a century.

This was Opening Day in 2024.

Baltimore: A fitting if unexpected place to begin

Opening Day was not supposed to start in Baltimore, but there might not have been a better place for it to begin. A rainout in New York made a 3:05 p.m. first pitch at Baltimore’s Camden Yards the unofficial start of the season.

Burnes, one of the biggest acquisitions of the offseason, threw the first domestic pitch of the year amidst a backdrop of new Orioles ownership, which hours earlier had introduced itself by buying a round of beers at the bar across the street. The scene was hopeful and celebratory, a moment loaded with optimism just five days after the death of former Orioles owner Peter Angelos and two days after the tragedy of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore harbor.

It was fitting, then, that a moment of silence preceded the singing of the national anthem, written by Key, which was punctuated by the Orioles’ fan tradition of shouting “Oh!” at the “Oh, say does that star spangled…” line of the song.

Opening Day is about hope, and in few major league cities was the sense of hope more pronounced than in the city where Opening Day got started.

Los Angeles: Hollywood entrance for baseball’s leading man

Most of the action began an hour later, at 4:10 p.m. ET, when eight games had their first pitches scheduled. There were players worth watching in each of those contests, but the center of attention was unquestionably Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, where Ohtani would meet the home crowd for the first time since his involvement in a sports betting scandal involving his interpreter became known.

What better place than Hollywood to embrace the drama and celebrity of it all?

Awkward first steps or not, until further notice, Dodger fans are Team Ohtani.

And Thursday, as the MLB season began in earnest stateside, Ohtani was serenaded with raucous ovations, write @katiejwoo and @FabianArdaya.https://t.co/iZ8PNWdb6M pic.twitter.com/0QF9ydHebv

— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) March 29, 2024

Wearing a Dodgers cap, a blue button-up shirt, and an impressive mustache, Emmy Award-winning actor Bryan Cranston walked to home plate to announce the Dodgers starting lineup that began with three straight MVPs: shortstop Mookie Betts, designated hitter Ohtani and first baseman Freddie Freeman.

The Dodgers players walked onto the field from the warning track, their families lining the way as they stepped one-by-one into a season loaded with expectation. Betts is playing a new position, Ohtani is wearing a new uniform, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto is playing in a new country. After a billion-dollar offseason, the Dodgers are as hyped as perhaps any team in baseball history.

Anticipation was such that the home crowd stood throughout Ohtani’s first Dodger Stadium at-bat in the home whites, and the game’s biggest international star delivered a two-strike double into the right-field corner. The place went wild until Ohtani was thrown out trying to stretch it to a triple, a Hollywood twist only the opposing St. Louis Cardinals could appreciate.

Cincinnati: The beauty and the agony of ‘anything can happen’

You probably don’t know the name Nick Martini. Honestly, you’re not supposed to know his name. Martini has been in professional baseball more than a decade with barely a season’s worth of major league at-bats to show for it. He was drafted in 2011, he’s 33 years old, and this was the first time he’d ever made an Opening Day roster.

Martini homered in his first at-bat. Then he homered again in his second at-bat.

When sports fans get romantic about their games, it’s often because of players like Martini, whose careers come and go with little fanfare but also with flashes of momentary greatness. They speak to our sense of possibility, and our appreciation of perseverance.

But with the good comes the bad, and just minutes after Martini hit his first home run in Cincinnati, Minnesota Twins third baseman Royce Lewis came up limping in Kansas City. Lewis, the first overall draft pick in 2017, should be a household name. You’re supposed to recognize him immediately.

But Lewis tore his right ACL in 2021. Then he tore it again in 2022. Those long absences have left him largely anonymous, known mostly by Twins fans and those who dream on prospects and their possibilities.

When he’s played, Lewis has been an exceptional hitter, and he homered in his first at-bat on Thursday. He singled in his second at-bat but was soon pulled from the game after he limped around the bases in the third inning. The Twins said it was a quadriceps injury.

Sports demand the good with the bad. A backup third baseman, Oswaldo Cabrera, hit a game-tying home run for the New York Yankees, and a utility infielder, Tyler Wade, played a crucial role a late-inning rally for the San Diego Padres. But Chicago Cubs lefty Justin Steele, who emerged from relative obscurity last year to become an All-Star and earned the Opening Day start this year, grabbed his hamstring after fielding a fifth-inning bunt and walked off the field with a trainer.

Anything can happen. That’s the best part and the worst part.

Two of the game’s great talents, Betts and Manny Machado, homered during the unique opening series in South Korea, but the season’s first domestic home run was hit by Trout in the first inning of Thursday’s first game.

Trout is widely considered the greatest player of his generation, but he’s coming off a down year lost mostly to injury, and his two-out homer to left-center field felt like a “remember me?” moment. It was as if he’d never left, and he wasn’t alone in reasserting himself.

Burnes gave up the Trout homer, but the 2021 Cy Young winner didn’t allow another base runner while pitching six innings and striking out 11 in his Orioles debut. Four-time All-Star Xander Bogaerts had the go-ahead RBI in the Padres’ comeback, standout shortstop Carlos Correa had three hits and two RBIs in a hard-fought Minnesota Twins win, and former MVP Aaron Judge doubled to start a seventh-inning rally for the victorious Yankees.

As for those top three hitters in the Dodgers’ lineup, they combined to reach base nine times. Betts and Freeman each homered and the Dodgers won easily. So did the Orioles. And the Reds. The Blue Jays powered their way past the Rays.

But it wasn’t easy everywhere.

Chicago, LA, Miami: Take the victories where you can find them

More than ever, baseball has become a game of mammoth home runs and high-velocity fastballs, but also still a game of well-placed bunts and journeyman relievers. Baseball prides itself on the little things.

In the fourth inning in Chicago, Tigers rookie Colt Keith lunged at an outside slider for such weak contact that the ball didn’t get past the second baseman. It was enough, though, for an infield single, the first hit of Keith’s career. The pitcher who gave it up was 24-year-old White Sox lefty Garrett Crochet. He took the loss — emerging Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal pitched six scoreless innings for the win — but allowed just one run in his first big league start.

In the fifth inning in Los Angeles, St. Louis Cardinals rookie Victor Scott II was on his way to a hitless afternoon. But Scott led the minor leagues with 94 stolen bases last year, and he made the Opening Day roster only because three other outfielders were hurt. When Scott reached base on an error, he immediately stole second for another career first.

In the eighth inning in Miami, Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop Oneil Cruz came to the plate 0-for-3 with two strikeouts in his first game back from the broken ankle that cost him nearly all of 2023. In that eighth inning, though, Cruz hit a leadoff home run that tied the game, which the Pirates eventually won in extra innings. The pitcher who gave up the tying homer was Sixto Sánchez, a 25-year-old former top prospect who, because of multiple shoulder injuries, had pitched in only one game, at any level, since 2020.

Not every Opening Day win shows up in the standings. Sometimes, simply getting there is the real victory.

Arlington, Seattle, Oakland: At the end, another set of new beginnings

As the clock touched 10 p.m ET, the defending World Series champion Texas Rangers were fighting their way to their first win of the season, one that almost slipped away; after they fell behind on a controversial call in the ninth inning, glove-first bench player Travis Jankowski hit a game-tying, pinch-hit homer, and All-Star catcher Jonah Heim hit a two-out, walk-off in the 10th.

At that moment in Seattle, Mariners ace Luis Castillo was preparing to take the mound in front of his home crowd, in a game that would see Tyler O’Neill set an MLB record by homering on his fifth straight Opening Day. In Denver, reigning Rookie of the Year Corbin Carroll was on deck for the Arizona Diamondbacks, who were not long from dropping a 14-run third inning (without a single home run!) on the poor Rockies. In Oakland, the Athletics were taking the field for what was almost certainly their final Opening Day at historic Oakland Coliseum before an anticipated move to Las Vegas. Fifteen minutes before first pitch, the stadium was empty as fans boycotted the game and instead packed the parking lot to show their displeasure with owner John Fisher’s plans.

In that moment, no one knew how those stories would end. They wouldn’t want to know even if they could.

The beauty of Opening Day is that it’s all just getting started.

(Top photo of Ryan Mountcastle: Daniel Shirey / MLB Photos via Getty Images)