Baseball is back — and the Pirates won their opener.

They could win their initial series. And the next. Still, it wouldn’t seem to matter in the much larger picture.

As evidenced by the implementation of a pitch clock, Major League Baseball already knows its audience is growing more and more impatient. Condensing the regular-season calendar should be next.

Opening Day typically bumps up with college basketball’s Final Four. Then, as the schedule — which is long and drawn out, but we’ll get to that — gets underway, the home stretches of the NBA and MLB seasons pull in most of the sporting attention.

And everyone knows the saying. April showers bring May flowers. The weather during this part of the year is fickle. One day, it’s 60 degrees and sunny, and the next it’s chilly, gloomy, and damp.

America’s Pasttime is at its best in the middle of the summer, when the sun is beating down and the days are long. The sting of making contact with a fastball in crisp air can’t be that fun, and bundling up for a football game in the fall feels right.

For an early-April game at PNC Park? Eh, not so much.

Who came up with the idea to play so many regular-season games, anyway? All 162 of them. The first few months of the season just feel like the batter stepping out of the box, adjusting his helmet, then his gloves, taking a few practice swings, and waiting for the pitch.

The playoff race doesn’t even begin to heat up until four months into the go-round. In theory, you can say every game means something. But it doesn’t feel like it.

In late-September, is anyone really pointing to a game or two in early-to-mid-April and saying, “You see, if we’d just pulled that one out”? For instance, in the NFL — which has the shortest regular season schedule of the four major American sports — the result of every game feels like its life or death.

Yeah, it’s nice to hear the crack of the bat and the whistle of a pitch into a catcher’s glove. Why can’t it wait a little longer, though?

Sorry, John. It had to be said.

Brendan Howe is a staff writer for the Butler Eagle