Opening Day "APRIL FOOL"

Every opening day for Major League Baseball brings excitement and hope for a great season.

If you live in Cleveland or any place where it is cold, it also brings you to hope that warm weather is here – or just around the corner.  Opening day also brings back memories of one of my favorite baseball feature photos.  It was April 1996, and I was assigned by Sports Illustrated to cover the Cleveland Indians’ opening day game with the New York Yankees.  Cleveland had a huge snowfall overnight, and the game was canceled first thing in the morning.  I called Maureen Grise, the baseball photo editor, to check-in and let her know the game was canceled.  Maureen knew of the cancellation but suggested I go to the park anyway to see if anything was happening. She said I always come up with something.  So I drove down to Jacobs Field. I grabbed my gear and walked into the park with my Nikon FM2 with a 180mm lens and Nikon F3 and a 300mm f/2.8 lens attached – all loaded with film and ready to shoot.  I also carried wide-angle lenses in my camera bag just in case.

As I headed onto the field, I was pleasantly surprised to find a couple of the New York Yankees players dressed in their uniforms playing in the snow.  I grabbed a couple of photos of them throwing snowballs and then I noticed Yankees pitcher Kenny Rogers rolling a giant snowball. The light background was not conducive for capturing the detail of the scene so I quickly changed my position so I would have a dark background.  This created a better contrast and also created a dark backdrop. The players did not stay out very long, and I immediately went to the airport to ship the film.  I called Maureen to tell her that her instincts were correct and the film was on its way.  The editors loved my images, and my photo of Rogers ran on the contents page of Sports Illustrated with the caption...

APRIL FOOL

Yankee Kenny Rogers uses his $20 million arm to have a ball when New York's season opener at Cleveland was snowed out on Monday.   Photograph by David Liam Kyle

Sports Illustrated(C) Copyright 2009 - DAVID LIAM KYLE

The image was captured with Nikon F3 film camera using a Nikkor 300mm f2.8 lens shot at f/2.8, 1/500th of a second on Fuji Provia 100 ASA film pushed two stops.