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

There are some terrible brand names in circulation.

So that's not even remotely the worst one that could sponsor a stadium.

My sister was talking to me yesterday about how cool it is that Yankee Stadium will be the only stadium (eventually) without a sponsorship name attached to it. (Yeah, yeah. Fenway. But come on, how long is that thing really gonna exist before it just starts disintegrating like Bitch Stewie?)

So that led us to a conversation about the branded plays, like the Lojack "Caught Stealing" or Johnny Walker base on balls, etc.

Which became a fun game on Sunday, to make up more branded plays. Any ideas?

HELLO!

As you may have noticed, I've been on indefinite blogging leave, thanks to--what else--the demands of gainful employment. Two years ago, I was able to get home from work at midnight, watch the dvr-ed game, and post the recap before 6am...

The problems arise when I'm not getting home from work til 4:30am, and then I'm faced with the painful realization that the old cliched complaint of "not having enough hours in the day"--a whine that I've always found particularly annoying--may actually ring true.

So anyways, things have let up a little on the office front, which is good for both blogging purposes and also for health purposes, the latter of which may not even be as important, but semantics.

So the Yankees are the best team in the AL East and the Sux are the worst. The good news is that the fact they're in first means the alarmists are kind of tempered for now, but the bad news is that the alarmists may have a valid concern in the whole Phil Hughes thing, who's been moved to the DL with something called "dead arm" which is as legitimate an affliction as whatever the Twins originally put Mauer on the DL for.

("Bilateral leg weakness disease"? Seriously, what would have happened if Mauer ended up going under the knife to treat this? "Ohh, hmpf. Well everything looks fine..? Maybe it's the flu.")

Anyways, so I'm back, and it's an exciting time to be a New York sports fan. Yankees on top. Rangers with a big win yesterday, Knicks...well, almost with a big win yesterday....

Almost a sweep. But hey, I'll take it. I don't know what it is about the Detroit-Yanks matchup that always seems to bring out the long-ball in everyone. Here's how the weekend played out:

Saturday's game was on Fox which means we had to listen to Joe Buck and McCarver talk about ferris wheels and carousels for a good 15 minutes, and then subsequently fumble around like a drunk freshman looking for her dorm keys at 4am, in an effort to find some distant connection to how any of this is at all relevant.

Mark Teixeira is good in the first weekend of the season, which is as confusing as seeing Steve Carrell in a dramatic villain's role. He homered (Tex, not Michael Scott) in each of his first 3 games. The only other Yankee to HR in each of the first 3 games of the season was Dave Winfield in 1983. So far, he's logged 7 ribbies, and is batting approximately .329 points higher than his average early season.

The thing about Tex playing so well is that it's probably the ONLY time in his career that a pitcher (such as Brad Penny) cannot yell at him "YOU F'ING SUCK" right after he walks him. However, this is exactly what he did say, taking a page right out of every Red Sux fan's book of logic.

The countdown to Jeter's 3000th hit continues with predictable overdone-ness. As my sister said, "Have you noticed how in the last 2 years every time they interview Jeter there's an increasing edge to his voice? Like he used to be Mr. Media and all smiles, and it's progressed into this undertone of 'Ok, yeah, I'm just trying to win, this isn't rocket science.'"

Buck and McCarver DID make one particularly interesting comment. (I just threw up in my mouth, I can't believe I just wrote that.) They were talking about Miguel Cabrera giving interviews in Spanish (why is this an issue? What about the Japanese players who refuse to go near anything that resembles the English alphabet?), and Buck goes, "You know this would be a wholllle other story if it was Arod doing this."

Well, at least everyone can agree that Arod gets unfairly treated, yeah?

AJ was good enough for the win on Saturday which is wayyyyy more than we can say about Hughes on Sunday. Maybe this should quiet the Up-In-Arms contingents about why AJ is the #2 starter instead of Hughes? Yeah, it's one game, but apparently there are bigger fish to fry, which is Hughes' complete lack of understanding re: why his fastball lost the fast part.

I hope beyond hope that this never becomes an Ollie Perez scenario. One of those pitchers who is good but forgets to have a stable psyche and then his talent becomes a paled version of its former self?? (Too early in the season for bad thoughts, I know. Someone just needs to tell that to Joel Sherman.)

Alright so the Yankees lose the first game of the season on about 2934 homeruns, and now the Twins come into town and AJ lines up the whipped cream.

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!

HERE WE GO!

It's officially Opening Day. It's funny how much stock I assign to this day every year, like a kid who has a shitty day at school and skins his knee at recess and leaves his lunch bag at home and bombs his spelling test, and all he can think is "I just gotta get through the day and then I'll be home and Mom will make it all better."

As most of you know, it has not been an easy year for me (in terms of free time), and every time someone throws another Fushigi Ball into the metaphorical mix, I just keep repeating over and over "Everything will be fine as soon as March 31 gets here." (There it is! The first youtube hyperlink of the year! That felt good. And I'm placing the over-under MLB odds of how many hyperlinks I do in one season at: 713.)

Additionally, I just spent the last hour online looking for this Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin comes home from a bad day and hugs Hobbes and says something to the effect of "things are looking up!" Copyright stuff makes it hard to find stuff these days, so maybe take the under?

Ok, I'm sorry. I'm delirious. I can never sleep the night before Opening Day (kind of like my boy Timmy here), so my coherence isn't up to snuff right now.


(Nothing, NOTHING, will ever top yesterday though, when I came home from celebrating my 30th birthday, got on the phone with Time Warner at 5:30 in the morning for reasons still unknown, navigated my way through the automated system to get to a customer service rep, and then in between nodding off on the phone, she finally woke me up when she said "How can we help you?" And I responded, "HOW DO YOU UN-NEUTER A DOMESTICATED ANIMAL?")

I slept-talk to the Time Warner person in my first phone conversation as a 30 year old. There's a sentence I really never thought I'd say.

Moving on...

THINGS ARE LOOKING UP. So here's what's been going on in the last month:

I just turned 30 on Tuesday, and it was probably one of my favorite birthdays ever. I didn't have a big party or anything, me and my sister went out and my favorite people were there and I was just really happy.

I went to Florida for 5 days to see my parents and go to some spring training games, and it's worth noting that I met one of the rarest breeds of sports fans in existence: the diehard, optimistic, affable, intelligent METS FAN. Yep. It was quite remarkable. And quite wonderful to be around. Jaimie from Jupiter, FL is the bald eagle of baseball... there's nothing greater than a fan with that kind of uncompromised enthusiasm and good-natured heart.

(Maybe I'm just so used to foaming-at-the-mouth Mets fans on the LIRR who basically just stomp around in their "I refuse to resort to logic when discussing sports" sandwich boards, but either way, cheers to Mets Fan Jaimie from Jupiter for being the Fan of the Game.)

I didn't get to Tampa, so I only saw the Cards, Twinks, Marlins, and Mutts play. (Sorry, I got nothing in the way of analysis here. I could not recognize a single name on the rosters except--oh wait--Carl Pavano. Not even Ollie Perez was there.) But from what I saw from the Defensive Linemen players*, we're probably going to hit another 234 walk-offs against Minnesota this year, and the Mutts pitching looks as promising as junk mail.

*The Over-80 Jerseys of Rookies

Anyways, since I've graduated from college, I've missed opening day once, because of ACL surgery.

Tomorrow (well, today actually. 9 hours from now.) I will be missing it for the 2nd time. Because of work. A 6 and a half hour meeting. On opening day. That which does not kill us...

(Plus, things worked out pretty good that year I had ACL surgery on Opening Day of 2009.)

Wow, that felt so good to be irrationally superstitious again!!! I'm not even kidding.

I can just feel it. It feels like baseball's really back now.

And so am I.

PLAY BALL.

I live for this, for MLB,
For every inning of sanctity,
For every pitch, for each at-bat,
Revering the talent beyond the stats.
I live for the scent of old leather mitts,
I live for the cadence of the walk-off base hit.
I live for the moment when winter gives way,
To the unmatched thrill of Opening Day.


I live for this, the stadium stands,
Fusing the hope of breathless fans,
The ballpark kinships, the impartial accord,
Strangers embracing when their team just scored.
The knowing nod that we give each other,
As we walk city streets of cap-clad brothers.
I live for the rivalries of rabid foes,
Who share a camaraderie only a true fan knows.


I live for this, all 30 teams,
And countless ambitions of childhood dreams.
The little league bats that grew into lumber,
The jerseys they wore of their role model’s number.
They’re heroes, they’re goats, they make grown men cry,
They can drive us to madness with one dropped pop fly.
Two leagues, 6 divisions, one World Series mission,
I live for their tribute to raw competition.


I live for this, the immutable ties,
Baseball endures past the scandals and lies.
Through gambling, through cheaters, through injecting the juice,
Through pine tar, through payrolls, through more drug abuse.
While some became cynics, and some became jaded,
The reality is that the game never faded.
Its imperfect beauty is a gauge of the times,
And the game still goes on, outlasting its crimes.


I live for this, the pure liberation,
The relief baseball gives us from life’s tribulations.
Its soothing erasure of pressures we face,
The unerring stress that lines the rat race.
When I’m worn down and beaten, I can put it behind me,
At the sight of a rookie who runs a hard ninety.
For there’s nothing more freeing, to make things alright,
Than taking off work for a day game delight.


I live for this, the history,
No single game is lost on me.
Each anthem rendition will give me chills,
A team takes the field, and time stands still.
The Cooperstown halls and the ghosts of the greats,
Who once were just men who reigned at the plate.
And years from now, I’ll be able to say,
Of some inductee: “I once saw him play…”


I live for this, for MLB,
The rapture and sublimity.
The tension that drenches a full count with two out,
The 9th inning rally that dismantles a rout.
The low-scoring game, the battle of aces,
The 12th inning jam, the loading of bases.
I live for the rush when baseball arrives.
The heart-stopping moments we feel most alive.
The highs, the lows, I’ll take it all,
I live for the sound of the words, “Play ball!”

AND IT BEGINS!!!!

I'm back, baby.

The long, cold, cruel off-season is over. It was so (relatively) warm today in New York City, it was like Mother Nature was finally throwing us a bone: "Ok, ok. Just this once though. To celebrate." Like a nondrinker having champagne at midnight on New Year's Eve or something.

In fact, today WAS kind of like New Year's Eve... the last day of the year before the new season is upon us.

2011. The year of 28.

Although I have to say, as always, I've been remiss in keeping up with the Yankees during the offseason. But from my unrelenting emails from MLB.com have suggested that the Yankees have had kind of a weird time off. I mean, no big blockbuster trades. We didn't get Lee (meh) or Crawford (stomach punch)...and there was some inexplicable dissention in the ranks with Cashman et al.

Oh, yeah, and that whole Jeter in the outfield thing was a little...out of left field. (Ahhh it's good to be back to making ridiculous baseball puns.)

I have a big presentation tomorrow at the office, (which means I can only wear my celebratory jersey for part of the day, but I can live with that)..but it also means I can't fully dive into my inaugural post tonight...

HOWEVAH, tomorrow afternoon? It's on like DK.

So here we go world. Time for it all to begin.

Time for the march to 28 to commence.

Time for Yankee season.

Life. Is. Good.