Reusse: Opening Day is bearing down. Remember to laugh. It’s baseball.

The San Francisco Giants were playing a night exhibition game in Arizona this month. The radio broadcast was on the MLB Network, and with Jon Miller on the play-by-play.

Miller was engaging a younger fellow in the booth in the conversation. There was a moment when this unofficial announcer asked Miller: “Did you mention there was a change at first base earlier?”

To which Miller responded: “Yes, I did mention there was a change at first base. I just didn’t say who it was.”

Mid-March, the baseball season closing in, the Grand Old Game facing issues, and I’d been looking for a reminder as to why it has been No. 1 for me since opening a pack of baseball cards at age 7 and finding out pitcher Wilmer Mizell had the nickname “Vinegar Bend.”

And now there it was on satellite radio: Just a tidbit from the all-time great Miller, offering the reminder that baseball remains alone among the four major men’s team sports that always should be consumed with a gentle humor.

Go to the ballpark, see a couple of bloopers in the field, see our guy Wavin’ Watkins get a runner thrown out at the plate by 10-12 feet, and the home team gets beat in the ninth.

So what? You had time to carry on a conversation with friends or relatives without missing a thing, and there’s another game tomorrow …

When our fellas tighten ’er up, and the Waver steals a run, and Jhoan Duran cruises through a winning ninth.

The NFL has no humor. It’s up to 17 games now, with the fanatics searching for flaws in most every win and treating every loss as a calamity. The comments from team officials, coaches and most athletes are either yawn-inducing clichés or unduly somber.

The NHL is the same — and those teams are mostly humorless for 82 games. And then the playoffs? We haven’t had to put up with one of those angst-filled runs since 2003, and that was with Jacques Lemaire, so there was some humor.

There are a few laughs in the NBA, admittedly, but much of it involves taunting. Bottom line: NBA coaches, players and live crowds spend so much time screaming at the refs that it overwhelms the fun factor.

Baseball? There’s always time for the laughs.

I mean, when the Twins first arrived here in 1961, the team was so appreciative of the need for humor over a 162-game season that owner Calvin Griffith enthusiastically approved of a three-person broadcasting crew that included local legend Halsey Hall.

Bob Wolff and Ray Scott split the play-by-play in 1961. Wolff went back to Washington in 1962, Herb Carneal came in from Baltimore, and there it was for five years: The greatest baseball broadcast you could hope to hear — Scott and Carneal, and Halsey clamoring around in the booth, known to set fire to the Western Union ticker tape with his cigar ashes.

Great season, mediocre season, no difference … we were listening.

One night in Anaheim, the trio took note of a young couple behaving amorously in an almost-empty section of the stadium. Halsey made a comment and, well, Scott and Carneal couldn’t get out a sentence for an inning without laughing like schoolkids.

We did our complaining about the Pohlads not spending properly for several months at the end of last season. Young Joe Pohlad even earned a Turkey of the Year Award for that.

Yet, if that’s all you got going for baseball, complaints, stick to the promise to boycott made last October.

This is baseball. One-62 of ‘em. Humor required.

I sent a text with this theory to Rocco Baldelli last week. The Twins manager contemplated, and then offered this in a 10-minute call:

“Baseball was our sport of the people for 100 years. They had their teams and went up and down with them every year.

“As players, as staff members, you have to stay in a good frame of mind, because it’s every day. If you can’t do that as a manager, you’re not going to make it. I’m sure Gardy [Ron Gardenhire] could do that. Tito [Terry Francona] definitely can do that.

“You’re at the field all the time. Your life melts into the ballpark setting. Enjoy yourself with the highs. Digest everything else.

“And always realize this: If you’re with a team or a fan of that team, you’re watching the quirkiest, weirdest game ever invented. It’s the only game where there are things that happen a number of times during a season, where two teams, and four umpires, and everyone in the stands is saying, ‘What was that? What’s the rule for that?'

“Seven days a week. You’re going to go through it all as a team, and so are the fans.”

There was good for three months in 2024, and there was bad for six weeks, and now it starts all over in St. Louis on Thursday. And just to get back in the mood on what fun baseball can be, I replayed Jon Miller’s confused moment of grandeur on San Francisco’s Opening Day in 2016:

“Swing — and there’s a high drive, deep into left-center field. It’s on the way. Adios, pelota! A grand slam for Buster Posey … ’s good friend Hunter Pence."