Opening Day

I’ll now start to self-medicate with baseball, our nation’s most ornery and eloquent game.

The lovely and patient older daughter reports that the family car is pulling hard right, probably from hitting a pothole. Her solution? Looking for another pothole to hit with the other tire to pull it all in line.

Not sure I’ve ever been more proud. That’s such a Chicago remedy … an Irish front-end-alignment.

“You’ve trained her well,” someone assured me, though my older daughter remains feral and largely untrainable, which in itself is an achievement. These women today, right? They breathe hope.

Look, life is a series of little ouches: car repairs, moldy cottage cheese, burning your fingertips on toast.

It’s the big ouches you hope to avoid.

So far, I’ve done a fine job of blending big hurts with little ones. I mean, haven’t we all?

In the evenings, I’ll now start to self-medicate with baseball, our nation’s most ornery and eloquent game.

By the way, these Dodgers! They’re older than your local Kiwanis Club, yet look at how they play. They’re an inspiration for seniors everywhere.

One more year, and the Dodgers will have to wheelchair through airports. Who cares, as long as they can muster the energy to stand on stage, strong and proud.

One day, the Dodgers will have to pay the piper. Ohtani’s ransom will come due, and this aging team will shift its focus to shuffleboard and the proclivities of Medicare.

Till then, admire and appreciate this marvelous baseball club, led by Dave Roberts, the best coach in all of sports.

Baseball is life, baseball is a tone poem. Los Angeles gets this more than most places, though most places love this magic game.

I’ve never seen it healthier. I’ve also never seen it more broken and expensive.

I hope — wait no, I pray — that baseball can avoid the big ouches. An owners’ strike looms, for instance, and more and more they’re trying to mechanize this lovely, bucolic game, a game that allows us — more than any other activity — to slow down and connect.

One day, I’d love to lead a fans’ strike, over $40 parking and $19 beers.

Till then, rejoice.

We are better when we all laugh together; we are better when America has something to cheer. Baseball is our opera.

By the way, here are the best baseball books of all time, no arguing allowed:

1. “Shoeless Joe,” W.P. Kinsella

2. “The Boys of Summer,” Roger Kahn

3. “The Art of Fielding,” Chad Harbach

4. “Catcher in the Wry,” Bob Uecker and Mickey Hershkowitz

5. “Perfect Eloquence: An Appreciation of Vin Scully,” edited by Tom Hoffarth.

Scully? Ever heard of him?

Honestly, I thought Dodger baseball would end the day he retired, and in some ways it has. When he died, baseball lost its Beethoven.

But oh my, does baseball go on.

So swing hard. Rejoice.

Saturday: They’re taking the sawdust out of Philippe’s? Sigh.

Next week: Here’s to Easter and “the blessed slenderness of spring.”