Clemens, Gooden, Morris Take Opening Day Mounds

Olympic speed skater Bonnie Blair, Texas tot Jessica McClure and Final Four fever in Kansas City highlight the festivities while Roger Clemens, Dwight Gooden and Jack Morris are baseball’s feature attractions today as the 1988 season begins.

Soldout crowds and nice weather are forecast for many of the nine openers. Detroit at Boston starts the season at 10:05 a.m. PDT and St. Louis is in Cincinnati an hour later for the traditional National League opener.

Bob Horner, back from Japan, Dave Parker and a bunch of other all-stars in new places are causing optimism across the major leagues.

Clemens, trying to become the first to win three straight Cy Young awards, will throw the first pitch of the season. He will be opposed by Detroit’s Morris, the biggest winner this decade, as the American League East champion Tigers face the Red Sox at Fenway Park.

Riverfront Stadium is also sold-out for the Reds’ opener against the NL champion Cardinals, who signed Horner in the off-season. Mario Soto, trying to overcome two years of injuries, will start for Cincinnati against Joe Magrane of the Cardinals.

“I don’t know if they’ll remember about me,” Soto said of the home crowd. “They haven’t seen me pitch in so long.”

Blair, the skater who won the gold medal in the 500 meters, will throw out the first ball at Comiskey Park before the Angels play in Chicago. Blair is from Champaign, Ill.

McClure will toss out the first ball, or try to, before Cleveland plays at Texas in the first night game of the season. McClure, now 2 years old, is the Midland, Tex., infant who was trapped in a well for 58 hours last October.

In Kansas City, Mo., college basketball is the big story as Oklahoma and Kansas play tonight for the NCAA championship. There’s a good matchup in town in the afternoon: Toronto’s Jimmy Key, the AL earned-run average leader, against Kansas City’s Bret Saberhagen.

Some of the Royals and Blue Jays are hoping their opener doesn’t go into extra innings--they have tickets to the basketball game later in the evening. In domed Olympic Stadium in Montreal, where the New York Mets play the Expos, Gooden opposes Dennis Martinez in a matchup of starters who did not begin last season with their teams. Gooden, who did not pitch until June because of cocaine rehabilitation, finished 15-7, and Martinez, who joined the Expos in midseason, went 11-4.