Opening day

Opening Day
2009 Opening Day at Dodger Stadium
Observed by	United States, Canada
2017 date	April 3
2018 date	April 2
Frequency	annual

Opening Day is the day on which professional baseball leagues begin their regular season. For Major League Baseball and most of the minor leagues, this day typically falls during the first week of April.

For baseball fans, Opening Day serves as a symbol of rebirth; writer Thomas Boswell once penned a book titled, Why Time Begins on Opening Day. Many feel that the occasion represents a newness or a chance to forget last season, in that all 30 of the major league clubs and their millions of fans begin with 0–0 records.

Opening Day festivities extend throughout the sport of baseball, from hundreds of Minor League Baseball franchises to college, high school, and youth leagues in North America and beyond. Since Major League Baseball generally starts their season first among professional leagues, their Opening Day is the one most commonly recognized by the general public. Most of the minor leagues start a few days later, but within the same week; the short season Class A and Rookie leagues are exceptions, since they begin play in June. (College, high school and youth baseball seasons vary widely depending on location and weather conditions.) Opening Day ignores the exhibition games played during spring training in the month leading up to Opening Day.

For generations, Opening Day has arrived amid pageantry. In Cincinnati, home of the sport's , the annual Findlay Market Parade marks an official "city holiday" with young and old alike taking the day off to cheer on the Reds. For decades, the first pitch of every major league season officially took place in Cincinnati, and the Reds remain the only major league team to always open the season with a home game (save for 1966, when they started the season at Chicago after rain washed out the opening series in Cincinnati; and 1990, when due to a lockout affecting the schedule they opened the season at Houston). The Chicago Cubs have been the Reds' most common Opening Day opponent, visiting Cincinnati 36 times on Opening Day, most recently in 2007. The Pittsburgh Pirates, whom the current Reds organization played their first Opening Day against in 1882, is a close second with 31, most recently in 2015; no other team has more than 19 (by the St. Louis Cardinals, most recently in 2014), largely due to the Cubs and Pirates rotating as the Opening Day opponents from 1899 to 1916, then the two teams and the Cardinals rotated from 1917 to 1952. Fittingly, the Reds were also the first team to host an Interleague game on Opening Day when the team hosted the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in the first year of year-round Interleague play in 2013.