The 2015 Major League Baseball season has officially begun, with the first game taking place Sunday and additional first games of the season scheduled to kick off Monday. The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Chicago Cubs 3-0 at Wrigley Field Sunday night, and the Atlanta Braves and Miami Marlins, the Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Phillies, and the Detroit Tigers and Minnesota Twins were among the 14 matchups set for Monday afternoon.
The next six months will feature a lot of baseball, culminating with the World Series, which is scheduled to begin late October. To make sure you’re ready, brush up on your Opening Day history with these facts:
- The first-ever Opening Day was held in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1876.
- The players who have hit the most home runs on Opening Day — with eight each — are Frank Robinson, Adam Dunn and Ken Griffey, Jr. ESPN reported that Babe Ruth and Willie Mays were among the athletes who had seven.
- There was a big snow storm during the 1907 opening game between the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Phillies. When the Giants started losing, fans threw snowballs at the umpires, according to Baseball Almanac.
- The Chicago White Sox’s Opening Day 1974 was interrupted by streakers, according to the History Channel.
- George W. Bush was the first United States president to own an MLB team: the Texas Rangers.
- But the first president to ever throw the first pitch on Opening Day was William Taft in 1910. He later threw a ceremonial pitch in 1912 — he’d missed Opening Day because of the Titanic shipwreck.
- The biggest Opening Day win margin came in 1955, when the Washington Senators beat the New York Yankees 19-1, according to ESPN.
- Jackie Robinson’s major league debut was on Opening Day in 1947.
- The first Opening Day game played outside of the U.S. came in 1999, when the San Diego Padres faced off against the Colorado Rockies in Monterrey, Mexico.
- Last year, hall of famer Ozzie Smith petitioned the White House to get Opening Day declared a national holiday. The Obama administration responded, “While we are sympathetic to your pitch to make Opening Day a national holiday, it’s a little outside our strike zone: creating permanent federal holidays is traditionally the purview of Congress,” according to CBS Sports.
See Monday’s full Opening Day lineups here.
