Today is the best day of they year. America’s pastime and our obsession begins. Today we’re all undefeated and in first place (except for the Red Sox and A’s, but we won’t get into that). Even though all the analysts have decided how we will do (hint: last in the NL East), today we look ahead and wonder. We’ve seen veteran teams achieve (1997) and underachieve (2005) and we’ve seen young teams fail (1998), struggle (2006), and win it all (2003). So today we celebrate the best day of the year because:

• We win with pitching and no one in baseball has a deep collection of young talented starting pitchers like we do: Andrew Miller, Scott Olsen, Chris Volstad, Josh Johnson, Anibal Sanchez, Rick VandenHurk, Ricky Nolasco, Sergio Mitre, Burke Badenhop, and more (note: Tampa Bay has quite a few, but not as many)
• If our pitchers can overcome the 5th inning wall we will win more games.
• We have the best bullpen in the division.
• Our unfairly maligned owner, Jeffrey Loria, has given us all we could ever ask for: a World Series, a ballpark, and the Marlins Mermaids
• Larry Beinfest.
• Jeff Conine was a Marlins once more, even for a day and can now retire into the South Florida sunset.
• Half the stadium today will probably root for the Mets, but the rest of us will keep smiling as we remember what we did to the them at the end of last season.
• Every game we play from now until 2011 is one less day for Wayne Huizenga to take our stadium revenues
• It reminds me of the early days and Charlie Hough, who recently turned 60.