Opening day was originally supposed to be this Thursday, but now we are in a continual state of unknown about when the season might actually start. The good news, at least, is that there is some baseball to watch on opening day.
MLB Network is televising some classic opening day games on Thursday, including Clayton Kershaw’s shutout from 2013 in which he also hit a home run (1 p.m. PT). That game is a classic for many reasons, and not just because Kershaw joined Bob Lemon as the only two pitchers to pitch a shutout while hitting a home run on opening day.
That win over the Giants is often remembered as a 1-0 Dodgers victory, mostly because the game was scoreless when Kershaw homered off George Kontos to lead off the eighth. But the Dodgers rallied that inning, scoring three more runs after Kershaw’s homer, with the runs scoring not as memorably on a wild pitch and two ground balls.
MLB Network’s opening day Thursday schedule (all times PT):
- 10 a.m.: Yankees at Indians, 1996 (Derek Jeter homers in his first opening day)
- 1 p.m.: Giants at Dodgers, 2013 (The Kershaw game)
- 3 p.m.: Giants at D-backs, 2017 (Madison Bumgarner homers twice, Arizona walks it off)
- 6 p.m.: Padres at Rockies, 2005 (a 12-10 wild one at Coors Field)
- 9 p.m.: Mets at Cubs, 1994 (Tuffy Rhodes hits three of his 13 career home runs)
If that doesn’t fully satisfy your Dodgers fix, a trifecta of MLB productions on Sunday should do the trick. It starts with “Baseball Seasons: 1988” (3:30 p.m. PT), followed by “Only in Hollywood,” a documentary about the 1988 Dodgers (4:30 p.m.), and ends with “MLB’s 20 greatest games” featuring the Kirk Gibson home run (5:30 p.m.), which includes Game 1 plus some studio interviews interspersed throughout.