Mike Celizic

All things are again possible. Baseball has begun.

I can give you 100 reasons why baseball is great. But every year on Opening Day, it comes down to that one thing: possibility. In a game that has no time limit and in which even the best players fail more often than they succeed, the possibilities are always endless in ways they never will be in other sports.

If you doubt that, consider a headline from this website’s baseball page: “Royals as contenders ... and other predictions.”

That’s the Kansas City Royals, who won their only World Series in 1985 and haven’t had a winning season since 1993, the cash-strapped Royals who live in the basement of the AL Central. They could be good this year, some experts have suggested. As the Rays showed us last year, it is a possibility.

Here’s another one: Many experts have picked the Cubs to win the NL Central and go to the World Series, an event they visited as recently as 1945 and last won a mere 101 years ago. Cubs fans have been waiting human forevers for that blessed event. But it’s going to take six months to find out if their hopes will be fulfilled.

OK, so there’s no hope for Pittsburgh. None for Washington, either. But even with those bottom-feeders, there remains possibility. Even in a terrible season, there will be great moments. And no matter how few those moments are, there will be, in addition to possibility, some other eternal verities.

Here are a few of them:

America’s Pastime
I know that football is America’s favorite sport and America’s Passion. But baseball is still and always will be the nation’s pastime, because that’s what it helps us do — pass the time. You don’t have to wait a week for the next game like you do in football. You don’t even have to wait two or three days as in basketball. In a good week, your home team plays every single day. In a short week, it plays six games.

No game translates to radio like baseball, so you can take it out with you while you cut the lawn, wash the car, walk the dog, tend the grill or drive home from work. And when you’re at work, you can call up a discrete window on your computer and watch the pitch-by-pitch action on MLB.com. Thanks to modern technology, you don’t have to imagine where the pitch was or how much that curve ball broke. The flight path is traced for you along with the exact spot it hit in or out of the strike zone.

Numbers
Some mathematicians say that the universe we inhabit and everything in it can be reduced to numbers. A growing number of baseball analysts would agree with them — at least as far as their favorite game goes.

Interactive MLB's spring preview Breaking down rosters, prospects of every team.

Nearly everything about the game can be quantified, measured and compared. Some of the comparisons may not be entirely justified — the conditions of the game, the players, the ballparks and the equipment change from one era to another and change the statistical biases along with them. But they can be made.

The numbers allow us to determine not just who the best players are, but who the best players are when the game is on the line. It has allowed the numbers crunchers to give value to defense — a phase of the game that for generations was talked about incessantly but never really broken down to its mathematical parts. They allow managers to match hitters to pitchers and vice versa and to position their defenses according to the dictates of science rather than to hunches.

The best thing about all of that is that since the numbers reveal only tendencies over time, they don’t govern any one moment in the game. So Manny Ramirez can save you with his defense, that left-handed hitter who can’t hit lefties can still get the game-winning hit, that weak-throwing catcher can still catch the best base-stealer in the business.

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