The second day of the season featured a light schedule: the second game of the Twins/Mariners series, the Orioles at the Brewers, the Blue Jays at the Tigers, and the Astros at the Reds.
Twins/Mariners
The Twins got three hits apiece from Roy Smalley and Rod Carew, on the way to a 5-4 victory. Roger Erickson got the win in his 21-year-old debut. As mentioned in the opening day post, Mike Marshall was a Twin in 1978, but he was holding out as a free agent. He didn't actually sign with the Twins until May 15. Accordingly, last year's closer, Tom Johnson, got the save with 2 2/3 innings of work.
Dick Pole got the shaft (sorry, I couldn't resist). He lasted only 1 2/3 innings, giving up 7 hits and 4 earned runs.
Orioles/Brewers
Baltimore finished 2d in the East in 1977, with a solid 97 wins. Sorry, no wild card back then. The Brewers finished next to last, barely above expansion Toronto. The Brew Crew couldn't score runs, and that produced a 67 win season.
The game apparently was postponed until the next day.
Jays/Tigers
The Tigers played .500 ball in 1977, but the matchup with the Blue Jays was hardly interesting. The Jays won 57 games in 1977, finishing last in hitting and next-to-last in pitching.
The game apparently was postponed until the next day.
Astros/Reds
This was the most interesting matchup of the day, these two teams having finished 3d and 2d, respectively in the NL West the prior year.
The Reds still had the personnel from the Big Red Machine, with Pete Rose, Ken Griffey, Joe Morgan, George Foster, Johnny Bench, Dave Concepcion and Cesar Geronimo, with Dan Driessen having taken over for Tony Perez at 1b in 1977. Ray Knight was waiting for his moment when Rose left the Reds. The Reds had won 88 games with that lineup.
The pitching had gone south, though. Other than Fred Norman and the outstanding Tom Seaver, their rotation in 1977 was weak: Jack Billingham, Paul Moskau, Doug Capilla and, you get the picture. Mario Soto pitched as a starter, and he would be a key contributor to the Reds later, but he was not too good at age 20. The Reds did have a solid closer in Pedro Borbon, but Doug Bair would get most of the save opportunities in '78.
The rotation returned in 1978, but they added a couple of young arms in Tom Hume and Mike LaCoss, both of whom had decent major league careers.
Houston was a .500 team in 1977. They didn't score many runs, but didn't allow many either. They were built for the expansive features of the Astrodome, with J.R. Richard, Mark Lemongello (fun to say aloud), Joaquin Andujar, and Joe Niekro getting most of the starts, and a bullpen of Ken Forsch, Joe Sambito and some other decent performers. That same group, with Vern Ruhle thrown in the mix, returned for 1978, but nearly all of them saw their performances dip.
The lineup was essentially the same too: Joe Ferguson, Bob Watson, Art Howe, Enos Cabell, Terry Puhl and Jose Cruz returned. Cesar Cedeno did too, but had injury problems that forced Puhl from LF to CF, and called Denny Walling into service. Rafael Landestoy was the new SS, taking over for the very light hitting Roger Metzger.
Of note, this team also included Bruce Bochy, who went on to a substantial managerial career, and Jeff "Penitentiary Face" Leonard in a cup of coffee.
Their opening day game was a slugfest, won by Cincinnati 11-9. J.R. Richard got pounded in 4 2/3 innings, giving up 7 earned runs. He did strike out 8, but that doesn't matter if you give up nearly 3 hits and 1 walk every inning. The Reds ended up with 16 hits, only one of them a HR (Joe Morgan). Morgan was a fantasy beast, even though fantasy baseball didn't exist then. How about this line: 3-for-4, 3 runs scored, 5 RBI, 1 HR, 2 doubles and a stolen base?
Seaver started for the Reds, and was just as bad, lasting only 3 innings and giving up 5 earned runs. Houston spread their hits up and down the order, but Jose Cruz was 3-for-5 with 2 RBI. Puhl, Cedeno and Ferguson all homered off of Seaver. After Cedeno's homer in the 4th, the game was stopped for a 38 minute rain delay. Seaver came back from the delay and gave up a double, single and home run to the first three batters, before Sparky Anderson removed him.
No wonder. The 4th inning rain delay was the third (!) rain delay of the game. The game had also been stopped for a little more than a 1/2 hour in both the second and third innings. Easy to see why the aces had trouble.
With two postponements and a third game delayed three times, the weather in the midwest must have been awful. It was in the mid-30s in Milwaukee and Detroit on that day (courtesy of NOAA historical weather data archives).
