Opening Day as a National Holiday?

This post is to celebrate the greatness that is the start of the baseball season. For those of us from the STL, Opening Day should be a paid holiday since everyone who is at work is watching or listening to the game anyway. I'm sure it's like this in other cities but it seems universal in Saint Louis that anyone you see on the street during Opening Day asks you if you've heard the score.

Quick digression--I hate the "Baseball's Best Fans" crap as much as anyone since giving crappy, no-talent white guys standing ovations for striking out doesn't make you baseball's best fans, it just makes you a big homer (Dan McLaughlin)--but I'd venture to say that as a percentage of population, St. Louisans do less work on their team's opening day than any other city in America. That could just be because we're lazy, but come on, we can't be any lazier on the whole than Milwaukee or Cleveland, can we?

I anticipate this lack of work to be even worse on Monday April 10th since we'll be opening our brand new 32,000 seat ballpark and nobody can get tickets. With the myriad of possible ways to follow the game online dicreetly and without your boss seeing (which is ironic because he'll be watching the game too), I conservatively estimate that the Home Opener will cost St. Louis businesses approximately $33, 168,648.00. I propose that next year, we'd be better to just cancel work so that I can stay home and watch the game on TV, um, I mean, so that the St. Louis economy doesn't suffer this huge loss of productivity. Join me, people of St. Louis!

Come on, at least my idea is a better initiative to get behind than this, and they've already got like 3,000 signatures (GROSS!). If any if you come out in support of "Retire 51" I'll break your legs.