At long last, baseball is back! The living players have their Opening Day tomorrow, but the dead ones -- the ones in my Strat-O-Matic league, anyway -- kicked off their fourth season of play tonight. In this contest, the two-time-defending-champion Haymakers visited the Canaries. After last year's collective whiff against Old Hoss Radbourn in the play-in game, the Canaries started the season hungry to claim their first-ever title. They jumped all over Cy Young in the first, and led 6-0 after four innings. Tim Keefe, the Season 3 Pitcher MVP, was cruising until Jesse Burkett and Cap Anson hit back-to-back homers to cut the Canaries' lead to 6-3. The champs continued to put pressure on Keefe, but he wiggled out of jam after jam. The key at-bat came in the top of the seventh, when pinch hitter Elmer Flick dug in with two on and one out. Keefe induced a weak grounder and the Haymakers failed to score. Rube Waddell relieved Young in the eighth and gave up a two-run homer to Roger Connor while still managing to rack up three strikeouts in the inning. When the Haymakers went down meekly in the ninth, the Canaries celebrated an 8-3 win. Season 4 is underway!
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