Sports Redux: The High Holy Day (Rained Out Edition)

In this multicultural, diverse, secular country we inhabit, there are holidays, there are holy days, and then there's Opening Day. All good people, save for a few heretic holdouts, have this day circled on their calendar as the final sign that winter is coming to an end and summer is just around the corner. It's a day of new beginnings.

(Note: the above was written before it became abundantly clear that it's going to rain and probably snow (our forecast, not official) all week, we're not playing today, and we're not even counting on any games being played around here until Memorial Day. If only there was a team that played in a dome that the Sox could have opened with. Way to go, Bud.)

Being Opening Day, in most of the nation, there's a smorgasbord of baseball reading for you to avoid work. The Globe has put together clipping of every Sox Opening Day newspaper from 1908 to 2008 (Our favorite headline: "TED HITS ONE, BUT SOX FLOP", from 1960. It's just so perfect.) Dan Shaughnessy is amazed that the '09 Sox are so professional without Manny Ramirez that he has to go on at some length about Manny Ramirez, because there's nothing else to talk about. Or something.

Steve Buckley thinks that David Ortiz could be the key to the Sox' success. Really. Bruce provides the rest of the links, so you can print them out and read them today, since there's no local baseball to watch. Also, Jose Canseco, who's been annoyingly right about the steroid era, says don't be surprised to see Manny's name on the list. Well, there's another couple of Shaughnessy columns.

The Globe also strikes up the string section for an article about how the economy is affecting life on Yawkey Way. Corporate sponsorships are down, people aren't buying fistfuls of "AL CHAMPS 2008" T-shirts, and Ace Tickets are only getting $150 for the $30 seats they scalped provided a valuable reselling opportunity for $250 last year. Heartbreaking.

In the rest of the sports world, the NCAA championship game is tonight: North Carolina vs. Michigan State. If you're like us, you stopped caring right about the time your bracket sheet got coated in red ink. But congratulations to all. The Bruins are ready to rest some guys now that they've clinched the East. And nobody was injured at Tom Brady's wedding to Gisele in Costa Rica, though paparazzi were fired upon. (On page two of that article, it provides some of the guest list, which makes us even more in awe of Brady's star power.)

Enjoy the rain.