Never mind the players, you can’t tell the baseball openers without a scorecard. The official major-league opener was played Sunday in Puerto Rico, with Alex Rodriguez tripping on his shoelaces and his Texas Rangers falling flat, 8-1, at the hands of Toronto. You are forgiven for not having noticed this because a day earlier the Pirates had opened – amidst great fanfare – not their season, but rather their new digs, PNC Park. The Pirates gave the home folks another shot at seeing the ballpark Sunday, then rested Monday so they could be ready to open their regular season today in Cincinnati. This is not, repeat, not the season opener for the Reds, who began their 2001 season yesterday by losing big to Atlanta, 10-4. The Braves promptly left town for a showdown series with the New York Mets beginning today, which will be the Mets’ season and home opener. By the way, the Pirates’ home opener – not to be confused with the PNC Park or regular-season openers – is Monday, with the Reds again providing the opposition. Got all that• Good. The thing is, the Pirates seem to be leading the league in openers, if you count stadium debuts and home openers, which even could prove to be a positive next Monday. The Pirates have been something of a bust at home openers, having lost their past seven. Annually, a huge crowd has shown up, consumed much alcohol, and watched the Pirates lose. Sometimes, the crowd has behaved badly at the sight. The lowpoint was the 1995 opener, won, 6-2, by Montreal. The crowd, its emotions, perhaps heightened by post-strike bitterness, saw the Pirates commit two throwing errors on the same play, plating three Montreal runs, and many responded by tossing their give-away Pirates flags onto the field. It took 13 minutes to clear up the mess; the flags, that is. The mess of a season chugged along to a 58-86 finish. That .403 winning percentage for 1995 stands as the worst for the Pirates in the past 14 seasons. Admittedly, bad teams have had something to do with the seven consecutive setbacks in home openers. Also, perhaps, the Pirates are mindful of past failures and are so eager to please as to be drum-tight in these games. Already having christened PNC Park with a couple of losses, and likely having suffered the odd defeat in regular-season play before next Monday, the Pirates might be more relaxed. At least they’ve gotten the PNC Park hoopla behind them. ‘It was nice to come in here and play some games and get all the questions that needed to be asked out of way, so we can concentrate on trying to win baseball games,’ left-fielder Brian Giles had said Sunday. Manager Lloyd McClendon, too, found the succession of openers to his liking. ‘I think this is the best thing that could have happened to us,’ he said. To come here, play a couple of exhibition games, get them under our belt, and then go out on the road, do our business, come back and get ready.’ McClendon is a first-year manager, but he’s been a Pirates coach long enough to be aware of the home-opener curse. Anything that might help produce a win, he’s going to applaud. Here, we invoke the name of the late Bob Prince, the former Pirates announcer who gave us the ‘hidden vigorish.’ It was Prince’s invention that maintained that the longer a team lost, the closer it was to a victory. With the Pirates having spent seven years in home-opener purgatory, and with the spotlight of that exhibition weekend dulling the glare of the home opener, this could be the year the Pirates finally win one. Or not. Sam Ross Jr. is a columnist for the Tribune-Review.

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