"It's great to be young and a Yankee."

The Yanks may be off to an auspicious start, but CYC of course has gotten a rather slow start off the block. Believe me when I say that my days of watching games on DVR at 3am are shortlived, on account of--if nothing else--my diminishing ability to function off 3 hours of sleep.

(I've been 30 years old for all of 2 days and already I'm getting imbued with all sorts of senior citizen limitations.)

Fortunately for me, the Yanks are off today (which is the 1st time in my life I've ever said that phrase. Wow.) But it gives me all of today to ruminate on the beauty of yesterday, the start of Yankee baseball, and of the pursuit for 28.

I've just recently been trying to get more Tweet-literate (I've learned that it's fruitless to try to take a stand against these things), and so I learned a lot about the game prior to watching it on DVR (something else I've also found completely fruitless is trying to avoid any form of communication in the interest of preserving the surprise of a dvr-ed game.)

I was at a client meeting from 12 til 7 last night, and I swear to God, these are the types of situations that really demonstrate how ridiculously long a way niceties go...I think just the fact they acknowledged that I was missing game was pretty cool--sacrifices aren't so bad when they're appreciated. Well played, client. Well played.

After the meeting was over and I'm looking at the barrage of "ONE DOWN!!!!" and "28 HE WE COME!!" etc texts/tweets/statuses/facsimilies/jet stream messages/smoke signals, I hear one of the clients on the phone asking if anyone taped the game.

I love finding out that work colleagues are real people, too. It's like how I always assumed my teachers in grade school did nothing except live in classrooms and bathe in chalk dust, and seeing one out in the food court or something was like mind-blowing.

"I'm just so happy the Yankees are back in my life," she tells me.

In an ideal world, I could see every Yankee game and never miss another Opening Day ever, but if I have to pay the rent and be responsible, then the next best thing to being around the Yankees...is being around Yankee fans.

ANDDDDDD we're back. In bullets because that's what I do when I'm too excited about stuff and realize that any attempt at cohesive thought will be as pointless as the white crayon.

Something I hate about myself: the fact I use periods at the ends of bullets here and nowhere else.

Something I love about today: the Yankees are the best team in baseball.

The above sentiment can also be used on any given day in the history of the world, which is something I love about the Yankees.

Okay, relevant stuff:*

*Mostly.

• This was the earliest day in Yankee history that the Yankees won at home. I like any superlative attached to the Yanks, to be clear, HOWEVAH I am hoping that this is the earliest it will EVER be. I DO plan on not missing Opening Day many more times in my tenure on earth, so I'd like to avoid sitting in GNH while the Super Bowl is going on. Which may be where it's headed. My old boss used to get frustrated because he tried to work around my sports fanaticism, but then said, "What the hell?? At any given time, there's some important sporting playoff or season opener or something going on. Soon there will be 300 days of the year where 4 sports are all in the playoffs at once."

• And we can have Tex to blame for this, who connected off Verlander for a 3-run ding: "I've been petitioning the league to start in March for years. Finally they let us start in March because everybody knows my Aprils," Teixeira said. "It's great to start this way. ... Last year was awful, it was embarrassing." Ok fine, let's start on March 29. That's my limit though.

• Mo's socks were confusing. First it made me sad because I thought, holy shit it's been so long since I watched baseball that I didn't even know Mo wore his socks like that. Then I googled it and was relieved. Then I looked at my own socks and realized they didn't match.

• I was SO SO HAPPY to see Tubbo.com again! Although..can I still call him that?? He was so lithe I almost didn't recognize him. I mean, it was pretty obvious that he scraped off 20-30 lbs of love, put 'em in a little beach bucket and then deposited them on Joba's doorstep, because every time I see Joba he looks more and more like some strange parade float you'd see in the Jack Nicholson version of Batman. Well he was good yesterday though. No runs. Good.

• I've said it before, I'll say it again: wherever the Yanks' DL is housed is definitely some kind of utopic bounty of panaceas. I rarely assume that someone just coming off the DL is going to be a little off (as I do with every other team) because with the Yanks, it's like they come back on the field and play as if they're college prospects scared of being passed over by a scout. Not only did Grandy take Verlander deep to break a 3-3 tie, but his fielding was superb.

• The Tigers failed to homer for the first time at the new Yankee Stadium. Isn't that weird? Huh. Well, ok then. Who knows though, I started fact checking the Snapple bottles once for no reason and found a few blatantly false ones. (My sister: "Who cares? More importantly, who does that??"

• Cabrera is still pretty good. He's one of those players I keep expecting to cool down and stop being so high up on fantasy rankings, but yeah he's good. 1 for 2, 2 runs, ribbie. But you know why I really like him? Throwback to something I wrote about him in 09:

The account goes on to note that Cabrera also was involved in an incident at the Townsend Hotel, a spot frequented by athletes and other sports professionals. It avers that Cabrera "got into an argument with a young man, telling him he was 'overweight and needed to work out.'"

I'm sorry, but that part is kind of funny. The idea of a baseball player being all cool and tough at a bar, and using playground retorts to comprise his vicious rhetoric: "Yeah, well, you're fat!"

What's even more ridiculous is the fact someone called the cops on him for this. No bar brawl. No physical violence. Someone took offense to this and called the police.

And they actually investigated? It sounds like the punch line of some "fat police" joke.

Off the head, initial reaction etc etc...seems there's better uses of the Detroit PD's time?

That'd be like if my boss asked me to put a report together and a month later, he asked why it was taking me so long, and I said because I was still testing out fonts.

• Cano wasn't so hot. Cue the alarmists "he's on the decline!!!!" Guarantee it. Cano is so insanely good at baseball that he will keep getting better every. single. year. For a while. Still won't deter people from trying to pin him down as the "sleeper decliner of the year."

• Jeter coming out to Darth Vadar's theme song is bizarre.

• Grandy's AB song was even more bizarre.

And there it is. Let the games begin.

Everything already is so much better now that the Yankees are back home.

How I felt up until 1:05 yesterday:
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell. ~Edna St Vincent Millay

How I felt since 1:05 yesterday.

WELCOME BACK, BASEBALL!