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

WIN

*"GO" emphatically. Not this. 

Magic number is 161! Right? 1st win of the season. First time also I had to compete with a Mets fan in a household for game watching privileges. Whatever, they lost, and the Yanks won!

And so the season starts.

I’ll go ahead and say it right now that it wasn’t exactly a seamless trip to the W. It was less like an Acela trip from NYC to DC, and more along the lines of any flight that goes through O’Hare—it’s a maddening experience, angering, depressing, deflating…but then all of a sudden, you’re on the plane and en route home, and you’re happy because no matter where you’re flying to, it’s not that long a flight.

And you wonder why you ever got so agitated in the first place. I mean, look at all the dining and shopping options O’Hare has to offer. You got a whole slew of shit in the 8-hours it took for the plane to finally take off, and now you’re able to get the ball rolling on your journey. So you shake it off and concentrate on that.

The box score belies the reality of the game, in that you’d think a 4-3 game with such an anemic Hit Column would be indicative of some pretty sharp play. I’d go ahead and say it was kind of the opposite of that.

I didn’t see a WHOLE lot of defensive pearls there, but then again, the Web Gems on MLB Tonight are galatically amusing this time of the season. (Oh wait you know who had a good play? GGBG. Of course. A nice neat sliding catch that he made look zippy and fun.)

But for most part, in league as a whole, everyone is playing like they just got called into a meeting that they weren’t planning on attending. You can throw in a couple of “Wait, can we go back to the last slide for a second?”’s and get some gold stars, but when it comes down to it, you’re gonna have reacquaint yourself with the agenda. Sooner rather than later.

 You know how I know this? Because none of the Yankees really scored in way that wasn’t akin to scratching on the 8 ball. This means their runs were “manufactured” by some a fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck supplier, aka a wild pitch, a HBP, and an infield single by Headley.

Even that third one counts as a ridiculous way to score, because really? Headley? Didn’t this guy teeter around in San Diego for a middle-management-accountant esque of a career? Sure, why not. Welcome aboard, Headly. Don’t let it go to your Headly. Yes, I said it. Sigh. Whatever, if Teixeira’s allowed to be all “What, I don’t hit until June, that’s just who I am, man!” then I’m allowed to ween into baseball recap writing pun exploration.

That said though, Tex HAD a hit today, along with Drew, Jacoby, and this Headly guy (who had 2, a big RBI and a palpably surprised interview on the YES post-game.) Pineda looked as shady as he ever did. You know how AJ was our token wild card, whose tats and blithely trailer trash essence made for some uncomfortable viewing experiences?

And by that I mean that any time the ball left his hand, even if he had been pitching a scoreless game til then, I’d still anticipate the likelihood that the ball would somehow end up somewhere it shouldn’t be. Whether that place is over the left field wall, or in the visitor’s dugout, or wedged in some fan’s ear canal somehow.

Ok, so yeah, you know that feeling?

Well it’s sort of similar to that with Pineda, only instead of having the expectation of toothlessly piercing wild pitches coloring the outing, there’s more of a sense that Pineda is like a pet tarantula. “You can hold him! He doesn’t bite!” Yeah, as far as YOU know. He seems awesome, but I don’t know if I now or ever will trust Pineda to not go all rogue on me. Oh yeah, ps he did a good job today.

A smattering of hits, but it was good enough to lead us to Andrew Miller. I gotta say though, I like this guy. He’s not half bad. And the best part is, he’s not anywhere near good enough for Mo comparisons to come out. Not that anyone is, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of another year of hearing things like “Who will be the next MO? Robertson? Betances?”

Yeah. Betances. He’s on track to pick up exactly where Mo left off. Delin Betances.

 I shouldn’t make fun, he got the W today. He followed Chris Martin, and the Coldplay jokes notably ebbed. As far as the Jays go, well, they played almost the same game as the Yanks, except with 1 less run. Seriously. Think about it. I bet some Canadian blogger somewhere is writing the same things as me right now, except more politely and with more focus on metrics. And hockey.

 So there you go. WIN 1. The start of big things for this team, yeah? It sort of feels like the sequel to any sports movie, in the sense that if there’s a sequel, that means that the first one was dynamite, which means the good guys probably won it all in the end.

But then the sequel comes out, and since they can’t get the entire cast to come back for the sequel, you’re looking at an almost completely new team that tries faithfully to retain the spirit of competition and tenacity that characterized the first movie’s Sport Team That Went All the Way.

Here’s the good news though:

Another piece of good news is that this shortened time between pitches thing is moving the game along pretty swimmingly (based on an N of two of course). Another game that went under 3 hours. On the one hand, I kind want this to attract people who are all “Baseball’s boorrring” but on the other hand, I think, “To hell with you. You can’t beat the clock. You can’t beat baseball. You can’t be my friend.”

See you Thursday night, when ROUND BOY TAKES THE MOUND!!! (on a side note, Fatso took over Jeter’s locker a la a coworker takes over the mini fridge of a coworker who quits. No surprise here, he wanted the locker closer to the player’s lounge. Oh my God, can you be any lazier? Amazing. I like his style.)