I felt like I had just gone to the all-you-can-eat Vegas buffet and come away hungry.

Opening Day is not just another game. It is the start of a 162-game campaign, a ritual marker in the American calendar, what Washington Post sportswriter Thomas Boswell once framed as “the day when time begins again.” And when your team gets the national slot — Giants and Yankees, no less — you show up a little hungrier, happier, more ready for baseball. A new chapter in a very old book.

Then you realize Netflix is hosting the broadcast.

Opening Day is not the time to trot out a new recipe. You already had the ingredients: two historic franchises, one of the game’s iconic parks, cable car in a dugout, and all the built-in energy the first game of the season carries. Your one job was simple: do not mess with the ritual. Let the game come to the viewer. Let the spectacle unfold naturally.

Instead, Netflix rushed it. Missed plays. Interviews layered over live intrigue. Ads on a service I already pay for. And a lower-third graphic — the scorebug — that looked like a spooked cat and told me almost nothing I needed to know.

That scorebug was more than a bad graphic. It was the perfect symbol of the larger problem. Baseball has different broadcast requirements than football or basketball because the viewer cannot see the whole field of play. The scorebug has one job: details at a glance. Runner on base. Count. Outs. Batter. Pitcher. In baseball, the scorebug is functional equipment, not decoration.

Netflix built a distinctive scorebug, and a useless one. All I could clearly see were the team logos, as if I needed help remembering the Giants were playing the Yankees. That is like designing a speedometer where the largest element is the destination instead of the speed. A scorebug should work like an umpire: present, essential, and never the lead story.

Netflix paid for Opening Day rights, but they produced it like a one-off event — a derby, a spectacle, a content property in need of extra seasoning. That is the mistake. Opening Day already has its own energy, pace, and meaning. It does not need filler. It needs respect.

That is what irritated me most. Not just bad commentary or clumsy graphics, but the familiar platform instinct to overproduce something that was already carrying its own weight. Opening Day did not need Netflix to improve it. It needed Netflix to know when to leave it alone.

Next time I will follow the lead of the wise: find a radio.

P.S. Sample scorebugs below: Netflix at top vs. traditional broadcasts.