Four nice pitching performances combined to shut out the Reds, 1-0, with Yadier’s homer in the 7th accounting for the game’s scoring.

I kept up with the game at work with my mlb.tv account; quite a difference from the way things were back before the internet, when I remember sneaking down to the TGIFridays’s on the ground floor of the office building I worked in for a couple innings at a time during the 1996 playoffs.

So I was able to fret in real time as  Kevin Siegrist and Carlos Martinez  had to get five outs in the bottom of the 8th after the defense botched two would-be double plays; Martinez squelched the rally by freezing Todd Frazier with a curveball described by Fangraphs’ Jeff Sullivan as “disgusting” during the site’s Opening Day chatter. I chose the wrong video feed from mlb.tv, as my Reds’ telecast for some reason showed the pitch from the camera located thirty behind and to the left of the home plate umpire.

Wainwright matched zeroes with Johnny Cueto through six, although Cueto was the sharper of the two. That said, neither offense had much of anything going all day, with the Reds’ highlight achievement being the four walks (one intentional) drawn against Wainwright, matching his total through the first five weeks of the 2013 season.

Trevor Rosenthal got the save with a 1-2-3 ninth, including four-pitch strikeouts of Zack Cozart and Brayan Pena to start the inning, and Roger Bernadina ended it with a fly to right on a 2-2 pitch, and after one game the Cardinals are where I expect to see them, in first place.

Every year around opening day I get an itch to do a blog that documents the baseball season in whatever haphazard, episodic form it happens to take, given life’s other priorities, and allows for an expansion of subject matter as I see fit.

So this morning, opening day, I’m walking to the train and I’m thinking about how good the Cardinals might be this year. I think, you know, Jhonny Peralta could have one of the better all-time offensive seasons for a Cardinals’ shortstop: if he’s able to match last year’s OPS+ of 119  it would be the team’s sixth-best in the last 100 years.

And what if Kolten Wong puts up a line of .280/.350/.430, and Matt Adams hits 30+ homers and drives in 100 runs, and Peter Bourjos uses that speed to get 35 doubles and 15 triples while playing a Gold Glove center field… and then I went through the rest of the lineup and then the starting rotation and then the bullpen, and I realized that this could be a historically great Cardinals team. Which I also thought would be a great name for the blog. Which forced me to go ahead and register the name, and one thing leads to another, and now here I am, during lunch at work seeing if I can get something up before the Cardinals’ first pitch of the season later this afternoon.