It’s important to get off to a good start in baseball for a couple reasons. The first reason is because no one wants to kick off the season in a slump, coming off a spring training where there might have been another guy who’d be better off with the roster spot. Second, it’s a long season and getting as much cushion in the stat columns early on makes those July and August slumps look not so awful.
The third reason is that you get included in videos like this one.