You can be forgiven if you didn’t realize that baseball season is in full swing.

You also wouldn’t be alone. Opening week for Major League Baseball went largely un-noticed. Colloquially (if not inaccurately) referred to as America’s pastime, professional baseball was hoping to start the season off with a bang. The historic opening series in Japan was meant to demonstrate how international the game has become.

Once that first pitch was thrown, gone would be images of the Mitchell Report and a suit-clad Roger Clemens along with his trainer telling conflicting stories to Congress about steroids. Fans could focus on the players on the field, instead of how uncomfortable Andy Pettitte looked “apologizing” at a podium.

Yes sir! Just get to that opening pitch and all those nasty images would give way to cut grass, fresh paint, peanuts and Cracker Jack.

There was just one problem. ESPN chose to broadcast the games live from Japan, so unless you were awake at 3 a.m., you missed them.

And so it went for most of opening week. Many of the games pitted teams from different divisions, so there was no immediate rivalry to get the fans – or television networks – interested beyond the opening day pomp and circumstance.

Take the National League West, for example: only the Giants and Dodgers opened against a divisional foe. For my money, theirs is a rivalry almost as storied as the classic Yankees vs. Red Sox. But because it wasn’t an East Coast rivalry, ESPN wasn’t there.

The defending National League champions, The Rockies, opened against the hapless St. Louis Cardinals, while the defending National League West champions, the Arizona Diamondbacks, opened the season against the Cincinnati Reds. These were hardly marquee match-ups for two teams that went deep into the playoffs last year.

In San Diego, the Padres put 2007 Cy Young Award winner Jake Peavy on the mound against the Houston Astros. He stood up as a man among boys, and completely dominated the contest – but it was not exactly front-page news. Maybe that’s why attendance dropped more than 50 percent for the second of that series.

Beyond the boring match-ups, two players not in anybody’s line-ups were conspicuous, not only by their absence, as much as the reasons behind it.

By virtue of his yearly flirtations with retirement, Roger Clemens no longer plays in April or May. Instead he waits to be picked up by a team in desperate need of a quality starter – usually the Yankees or Astros.

Typically in the early season, a front-line starting pitcher has been injured coming out of spring training and Clemens is viewed as a potential season savior. For the past four seasons, the No. 2 story in baseball isn’t about a particular team or match-up, it’s where Clemens will pitch this year.

Because of his high-profile testimonies this off-season, the clamor for Clemens’ services has been deafeningly silent. That isn’t to say he won’t be picked up by someone, but so far it’s not exactly a “hot stove.”

Still the most conspicuous absence in all of baseball has been Barry Bonds. Forced out of San Francisco last year, the home run king made a point of saying he wasn’t retiring and wanted to play somewhere – even if it wasn’t in the City by the Bay.

While Clemens is the second storyline on sports pages across the country, Bonds has consistently been the lead story for the better part of a decade at this time of year. By now he’s usually blasted a couple of towering home runs, embarrassing pitchers and drawing boos from partisan fans in whatever city he visits.

With no Bonds in any team’s line-up this year, there’s no steady villain, no reliable story line to exploit and no foil to baseball purists.

Because there is no obvious controversy for baseball to stay on the front pages of newspapers across the country, sportswriters were left only with one story to write about: the actual game on the field.

It’s not that writers didn’t try to stir up controversy, but sadly for them, the pickings were slim. All they had to write about was a third-base coach who stepped out of his coaching box and was subsequently over-punished with a three-game suspension. There was also a ruckus over whether Jake Peavy had dirt, pin-tar or poo on his hand.

These stories were, perhaps understandably, non-starters.

Consequently, fans, who have grown more accustomed to interpreting indictments and sworn testimonies, may take a little training before they remember baseball is an elegant chess match played with balls and strikes, and not needles and pills.

Baseball is supposed to be a pure game, where the only advantage is meant to be natural physical ability.

Hopefully San Diegans will remember that and pay attention the next time Chris Young and Houston’s Brandon Backe pair up, or when 348-game winner Greg Maddux puts on a fielding clinic, while en route to what will probably be another gold glove season.

We can only hope.