If anyone needs any more reason to get excited or nostalgic, here are some quotes to remind us that Opening Day is the best day to be a Reds fan (please post some of your own guys... I love collecting these)
"In Cincinnati, baseball has always been less a sport than a kind of psychosis. It is to the natives what bullfighting is to the citizens of Madrid, and is approached with the same passionate enthusiasm and subjected to the same universally expert consideration.'' - The New Yorker
"It was like a state fair of baseball. I remember thinking: 'Yeah, this is the way America is supposed to go about baseball!''' - Don Sutton
Many baseball purists feel the same way, as evidenced by one guest's dismissal of the Yankees-Devil Rays game on a nationwide cable TV sports program last week. "That's not Opening Day,'' he sniffed. "It's in Cincinnati.''
-Barry Horstman (The Post)
"It's known around the country that Opening Day in Cincinnati is different than anywhere else. Opening Day in Cincinnati has become an event that's more than just the game." -Neil Luken
"New England has Patriots' Day. Our local, so-called holiday is Opening Day and the Findlay Market Parade." - Luken again
Cincinnati was so protective of their traditional opener status, that in 1988 the city council voted to turn back the clocks in Cincinnati on Opening Day, to ensure that the Reds played the "first" game of the season.
For generations, Opening Day has arrived amid pageantry. It is celebrated nowhere as heartily as in Cincinnati, Ohio, home of the sport's first professional team, where an annual parade marks an unofficial "city holiday" with young and old alike taking the day off to cheer on the Reds. - Wikipedia
"There is no sports event like Opening Day of baseball, the sense of beating back the forces of darkness and the National Football League."
- George Vecsey
"However, at Cincinnati the first game is always played there. This is because the Citizens of this Ohio city do not consider Opening Day just as Opening Day. They consider it one small notch below Christmas."
-Fred Schwed, Jr. (1957)
...any more?
