Commentary: MLB's Giants-Yankees Opening Night Netflix cash-grab proves nothing is sacred in modern sports

Baseball's Opening Day is supposed to mean something. It's tradition. It's the bunting draped over the rails. It's the pomp, the circumstance, and a deep, abiding reverence for a sport that has 150 years of lore. It's a special day. But baseball's new "Opening Night"? Well, that was a completely different story. This forced standalone spectacle streamed on Netflix didn't care about reverence. It was a gross, bloated infomercial masquerading as a baseball game. Netflix wasn't here to serve the sport. No, it was the other way around: Major League Baseball and its captive audience (which is still massive) was served up on a silver platter for the streaming giant to bastardize. The good news? We're told it was a one-off. The next Netflix MLB event is the Home Run Derby. They can have it. The bad news? This is modern professional sports, where bad ideas usually get a sequel as long as the check clears. Some of it was harmless enough: The San Francisco cable cars and New York yellow cabs trotted out to introduce the Giants and Yankees were lame but fine. The gigantic, logo-slapped inflatable baseballs and the fleet of 73 red kayaks clogging up McCovey Cove? Annoying, sure, but at least they kept that nonsense outside the stadium gates. But having hack comedian and manosphere consigliere Bert Kreischer introduce the teams? (Frankly, it's a miracle he kept his MLB-logo sweatshirt on; removing his top is the only trick in his bag). Having a bunch of on-field dancers? (Netflix seemingly scrapped a plan to have "The Thing" — yes, the disembodied hand from the Addams Family — deliver the baseball for the first pitch. It was practicing hours before the gates opened.) It wasn't a baseball game. It was a corporate sideshow from the same folks who put on the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson boxing match. It was a cheap soiling of the beautiful blank slate that a new season is supposed to provide. Everyone knew it was absurd. Everyone knew it wasn't right. Thank goodness someone had the good (perhaps last-minute) sense to have Bruce Bochy and Dusty Baker throw the first pitches. "This sport is based in tradition more than any other," said Giants manager Tony Vitello, who is not a golfer and whose head had to be spinning before his first true big-league game in any professional capacity. "Get the bunting out. Opening Day comes with so many things. The players that I've either gotten to know in the big leagues … a common theme from them was, other than the playoffs, this is the best day of the year." What was that Wednesday? (I'm not referencing the Netflix show.) Go ahead and call the classic Opening Day script stale. Call it stodgy. Call it outdated. But there is an undeniable magic to the start of a grueling 162-game marathon. You pay proper respect to the grind ahead without exhausting yourself on Day 1. It's supposed to be a celebration of the sport we love, a ceremony meant to honor the game and the incredible athletes who did the near-impossible and clawed their way onto the opening roster. Guys like Jared Oliva. The speedy outfielder hadn't sniffed the big leagues in five years. Half a decade in the wilderness gives a man plenty of time to question if he's ever making it back. On Tuesday, the Giants brass finally told him that after a stellar spring, he was returning to The Show. By all accounts, it was a pretty emotional meeting. "A lot of times, you look at yourself in the mirror, and — I wouldn't say you're questioning if you can keep going — but you feel like you're going against the current sometimes. But it's amazing what this game can kind of reward you with if you just keep, keep your head down, keep working," Oliva told reporters before the game. Oliva didn't hide it in his pregame conversation: Standing on that chalk line and having his name announced was going to be the emotional culmination of years of grit. He will have to wait until today for the pleasure. That, honestly, is for the best. Because the star of The Machine (a box office bomb that grossed $10.45 million on a $20 million budget) was yelling at the top of his lungs in some sort of hype-up speech on the PA system. Something about how this is baseball and America. Suffice it to say, Kreischer is no Jon Miller. He's no Dave Flemming. He certainly isn't Renel Brooks-Moon. I guess that's why the Giants are desperately billing Friday's second game of the season as a "traditional" Opening Day. We had nothing to do with that. But it all demands that we take a look at the bigger picture: What do we actually value when it comes to these games? The suits running these leagues only care about one thing: making the number go up. Extorting cities for taxpayer-funded ballparks, long, money-grabbing lockouts, slapping corporate patches on jerseys, plastering FTX logos on the umpires, $20 domestic beers, and selling off baseball's most sacred day to a streaming service whose guiding principle is to appeal to the lowest common denominator — it all brings in cash. It inflates franchise values. The number goes up. But in the service of what? I'd like to naively believe this is all in service of the sport. It's about making the game better, more accessible, more enjoyable for the fans. And sure, MLB will spin it exactly that way. Netflix is in 190 countries! But Wednesday's debacle proved the long-held suspicion: The numbers need to go up to service, well, the number itself. It simply must go up, no matter the cost to reputation, to tradition, to the soul of the game itself. The problem: Once you sell those, no amount of riches can buy them back. The Giants will do what they can to clean up this mess on Friday with their Opening Day. Miller will be on the mic. The entire roster will be announced. We'll get some sweet, sweet organ music. They had little choice but to be good soldiers in Rob Manfred's army — Netflix needed the Yankees to play somewhere warm for this perverted experiment, after all. But seeing as Wednesday will be the Giants' last earnest Opening Day, Night, or Afternoon for a while yet — Major League Baseball's 2027 lockout has all the makings of a spring-deleter — it's a tough pill to swallow. Some things are sacred. But everything is for sale.