MLB Fans Know How Australian Open Fans Feel

With a pair of vintage finals pairings at tennis’s Australian Open, tennis fans can find brethren in devoted baseball fans.

This is first and foremost a baseball site, but we would be remiss not to acknowledge the tremendous tennis intrigue in Melbourne at the Australian Open. With this morning’s women’s final of Serena Williams vs. Venus Williams and tomorrow morning’s men’s final of Roger Federer vs. Rafael Nadal seemingly ripped from the brackets of a decade ago, tennis fans and sports fans in general may find themselves tempted to wake up for the 3:30 AM ET start times. Baseball fans have been there before.

We fans of Major League Baseball are no strangers to highly anticipated games being played on the other side of the world, as the 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012 seasons all started with a pair of games played in the Tokyo Dome. These late-March contests counted the same as any other regular season games, but they were the first meaningful games in five months. Any truly devoted fan would have to watch, right?

Unfortunately, it was only fair that since these games were played in Japan, they would be played at a time convenient for the host country and not for the majority of those of us here in the United States. In March 2000 I was living in Arkansas. I was a few months shy of my 16th birthday and cherished my sleep, but I was absolutely starved for baseball. I set my alarm for 4:00 AM so I could watch the first game of the season between the New York Mets and the Chicago Cubs.

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It wasn’t a particularly exciting game, perhaps in no small part due to the huge time difference. On two occasions Mets starter Mike Hampton would walk three consecutive batters, ending with nine total over five innings. Cubs third baseman Shane Andrews had a pair of errors, though he did hit a two-run homer in the 7th inning that would account for the final margin in the 5-3 Chicago victory. It didn’t matter to me that the quality of play wasn’t in midseason form. It was better than midseason: baseball was back. The game even ended right at the time I would have normally set my alarm.

I woke up at the same time the next morning, though I think I might have drifted in and out of sleep before the Mets exacted their revenge with a Benny Agbayani pinch-hit grand slam in the 11th inning to claim a 5-1 victory. I repeated the process every subsequent four years. In 2004 I was a sophomore at Rice University in Houston, TX. In 2008 I was a first-year business school student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. In 2012 I had just moved to Virginia Beach, VA and was about to start a new job. The result was the same: I watched the entire first game, did my best to watch the second, and the team who lost the first game won the second game.

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If you loved baseball, you were watching the opening series in Japan. If you love tennis, you’ll probably make sure you’re awake at least for the Federer-Nadal match if you didn’t stay up or wake up for the battle between the Williams sisters. Whether your sport of preference is baseball or tennis, sports fans love watching history as it happens.