NY Times columnist David Brooks, a lifelong Mets fan, writes he is contemplating a switch of allegiance to his adopted town's new team, the Washington Nats.

[A] love for a team can be a philosophical love, a love for the Platonic ideal the team embodies. For teams not only play; they come to represent creeds, a way of living in the world. The Red Sox ideal is: nobility through suffering. The Cubs ideal is: It is better to be loved than feared. The Yankee ideal is: All cower before the greatness that is Rome.

The Mets ideal is: God smiles upon his darlings. The history of the Mets teaches that miracles happen and the universe is a happy place. If this is the nature of my love, then I can only love the team so long as it still embodies this ideal.

The Amazin's no longer do, though for nearly a quarter-century, the Mets were lovable as the antithesis of the Pinstripes -- until becoming their obnoxious NL carbon in 1986, a date I, as a Sox fan, can pinpoint with accuracy.

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The old ballgame still has its grip, George Will writes in an Opening Day column.

Conservatives are forever being lectured that "you can't turn the clock back" — and shouldn't want to. Oh? This season, for the first time since the Astrodome opened in 1965, every National League game will be played on real grass. What a concept. There are many other reasons why this is baseball's Golden Age, but, in the words of former Phillies manager Larry Bowa, "I don't want to beat a dead horse in the mouth."

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Have been enjoying Ken Burns' Baseball in snippets over the past week, and the segments on the Forties and Fifties had me again asking myself the question:

Had I lived in New York City in the mid-20th century, would I have been a Giants or a Dodgers fan?

The Bums would seem the ready answer, but I may well have pulled for the Giants – there seems to have been about them, with their tradition of McGraw and Mathewson and the Polo Grounds, more of an old Gotham-McSorley's sort of air. But I would look to NY historians such as Steve M. and Andrew Cusack for clarification in this regard.

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Listen: "Geechee," by Fats Waller