I'm sure I'll get burned for this, and maybe rightfully so, but I'll say it anyway.

 

Nobody alive today had anything to do with slavery in this country, yet people are still judged concerning it, and yes paying for it. 

Did you know? Mr. Bisher was there for that first game in 1869.

Well supposedly the Egyptians invented baseball. Pharaoh Bisher was there for it, complaining about all the Israelites in the league.

I see nothing wrong with what he said. Pearl Harbor was 66 years ago. In the big picture, 66 years is the blink of an eye. There are old timers who were alive then, or whose parents were alive then, or fought in WW II. Many seniors still have strong feelings against Japan. There are peoples on this planet that hold grudges for a thousand years. I have no issue with Americans having hard feelings against Japan 66 years later.

I'm not going to get into a Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima debate. I won't change your mind and you won't change mine. But I would like to watch you find a WW II vet who isn't a big fan of Japan and tell him he's an ignorant racist. That should be fun.

it seemed a little strange to me that they played the first game in Japan.  Someone smarter than me could probably answer why.  Also why don't they open the cricket or rugby season in the states to increase exposure for those sports?  Heck send Dubya over to England to celebrate the 4th of July while we're mending fences.

Like I said in another thread, whatever. It's something to give back to Japan now the MLB will eventually get all of their great players, it's only 2 games (leaving 160 to go), and in a month, everyone here will forget about it. So why the fuss?

I think it is a travesty that the first game is not played in Cincinnati anymore. Opening day in Cincinnati is one of the great sporting days of the year. I have never met a Cincinnatian or non-Cincinnatian that doesn't agree that opening day in Cincinnati is special. MLB has tried to lessen that with this crap in Japan and even opening night in DC but the first Monday of baseball season in Cincinnati remains the true opening day. As for this guys comments... I was so fired up about him actually recognizing the awesomeness of opening day in Cincy that I lost track of what I reading and started writing this post.

 It's quite a strange feeling to hear people mocking one of your old idols, in this case Furman Bisher, for being "old."  Wouldn't it be nice, I think, if all the people who write that could experience "old" for themselves, as most of them probably will some day. But by then it will be too late to come back and correct your youthful indiscretions. Let's just say that I don't know why Furman is so aggravated about opening our U.S.  baseball season in Tokyo, and I don't think it's appropriate for him to be milking the hostilities of World War II, bad as they were, in the year 2008. At the same time, I remember what an incredible sports writer this man Bisher has been for so many years. And more than that, I remember him in his prime, when we 10 or 12 members of his sports staff at the Atlanta Constitution, together with anybody in the whole doggone country who wanted to write about sports, would have given his or her all to have half the sheer brio, verve, vigor and vitality -- to say nothing of the writing skills, that throbbed inside the daily columns which were headlined simply "Furman Bisher."  I remember when he was recruited by Sports Illustrated, which was just starting up, to be its first baseball writer, and even though he was offered $25,000 a year, an unimaginably princely sum back in the 1950s, he elected to stay in Atlanta, at the newspaper he loved, even though he hailed from a little town called Denton, near Greensboro, North Carolina. Furman Bisher is one of the greatest sports WRITERS who ever came down the pike, whatever he now thinks about opening the American. baseball season in Japan. And it's for sure he's no racist -- never was, never will be. Speaking of prejudice, what do you think is the right word for thinking that all Southerners are racists, or that anybody who doesn't hail from your era is an old, expendable, out-of-touch bag of bones?   And by the way, about Furman's picture -- just FYI, the girls were swooning at his feet when he was your age, folks.