Why Opening Day matters

The other day, I was talking to my therapist. Conversations between him and I have gotten funnier since I started taking psychology college courses. Sometimes, I know the answer to the question I am asking him before he says anything. Sometimes, he quizzes me on it.

This time, I threw him for a little bit of a loop and asked how he was doing. I told him that I could vent to the walls, but that I would rather know that I was talking to a human being. I insisted, saying that I would not talk about myself until he gave me a two-minute check-in on how he was.

Like everyone else, my therapist has been spending time practicing different versions of self care to try and avoid getting overwhelmed by everything that is currently happening in our world. He'll leave his phone at home and go for a walk with his family, or turn on a movie and absorb himself in it completely.

A few months ago, my therapist convinced me to buy a Playstation 5. He told me that I needed an escape, somewhere for my brain to go where the stress couldn't follow. I needed to find something of a "flow state" where time passed without me realizing it.

Lately, I've been using that Playstation 5 to play Red Dead Redemption 2, a game released almost seven years ago that I haven't played since. And, honestly, it's a pretty nice escape.

Unlike the last time I played through it, I am not following the missions religiously to get to the end of the story as fast as possible. Just the opposite. Sometimes, I'll grab a rifle and just go hunting for a few hours. The other day, I spent some time before bed playing poker in an old saloon. It's these moments, when I am literally just living another (fake) person's life from another time and place, where I feel the immense pressures of the world fade away from me.

As someone who is in the process of launching a media company that very much does not plan to "stick to sports," I understand the rhetoric from people who want us to. Sports, like video games, are a distraction from the real world.

Now, maybe it's because I am a fan of the Dallas Mavericks and Dallas Cowboys, but the NBA and NFL haven't offered me a legitimate distraction in quite some time. I would say the same for Tottenham Hotspur, but my current employment situation has just as much to do with me cancelling my Peacock subscription as their putrid performance does.

But, the San Diego Padres? The team that won 93 games last year, the most they had won in a season in 26 years? That's a distraction I can get behind.

I know they went scoreless in the final 24 innings of playoff baseball, on their way to losing an NLDS series against the eventual World Series Champions, but there's still hope. There's still a level of competence in a team that has been to the playoffs in three of the last five years.

There's a reason to believe in a higher ceiling for the likes of Fernando Tatis Jr., Jackson Merrill and others. The Padres are a good team, and they could be a really good team, even if they have to deal with the Dodgers and Diamondbacks in their division.

Add that to the fact that Major League Baseball has 2x as many games as the NBA and about 10x as many games as the NFL, and it's easy to see what Opening Day means for myself and other San Diego Padres fans: Roughly three hours of engaged distraction on an almost daily/nightly basis.

And for those off-days, there's always the hunting at Cattail Pond.