This Week in Yankee Baseball
Juan Soto at Minute Maid Park, Houston (TX). Image courtesy of the New York Yankees.
Happy Opening Day, nephew.
In the maligned but nevertheless it’s-fuckin’-classic-to-me Jonathan Franzen novel Strong Motion, you’re basically fed the idea that a young man can consume a few innings of baseball before or after ruining his professional or romantic prospects. (The way the Red Sox of that story’s timeline jut in and out of narrative is another great hint, by Franzen, at how one’s relationship with baseball can be dogmatic one minute, passive the next.) I think about this every time I don’t stumble into a game in progress, how I am unlikely to last an entire nine innings, especially if I don’t have some other activity going simultaneously. I must thus be doing baseball all wrong. Maybe I’ll write this next week with the commentary running in another tab.
The Evil Empire has entered the season a little haphazardly, with the fanbase pessimistic that the front office has done enough to correct the malaise of a .500-ish season in 2023. Many wanted one of or both (Chairman) Brian Cashman and (Manager) Aaron Boone fired, but I don’t think people — least of all Yankee fans — can quantify what this means. The payroll’s the second most expensive in the league. There are always little things you can do, sure, but very little that would get people the ball-team they covet in the World Series contenders of others. There is a lingering, non-verbal regret at the slow and now-complete disintegration of the ‘Baby Yankees’, a group of prospects from which only Aaron Judge now reigns as the Pinstripe graduate. People want a great group of guys that can play synchronised defense when there’s a lead to protect; but they also want the chequebook out in the off-season, and they want it blank — in a league that even the Yankees concede has caught up, tipped the balance even, with analytics.
This is why injuries undo the win-loss tally when they happen. There may be a clear ball-playing identity in a farm system that feeds the team with some of the league’s most exciting prospects — but little besides a legacy, a promise, defining Yankee ball in the majors. This identity crisis has a cost on the business of winning, and has not been aided one bit by the emergence of the free-spending Mets right there in Queens.
These are roughly the vibes currently, after an off-season injury to pitching ace and 2023 American League Cy Young Award-winner (and exhale) Gerrit Cole; even after the acquisition of Juan Soto in one could say a relatively inexpensive trade. Soto’s a free agent next year, admired quite publicly by the Mets, but the San Diego Padres gave the Yankees an opportunity to at least shift some of the talent that didn’t quite work the needle. God bless Kyle Higashioka, and some useful at-bats on very bright Sundays against playoff hopefuls in the Bronx. His departure was symbolic of several, this off-season, when it comes to players we kept hoping would come good.
Baseball is cruel like this. It only takes a moment to believe you’ve got something special on your lineup, and then before you know it you’ve waited several years too long to see that twinkle turn. Luis Severino, Wandy Peralta, Domingo German and Isiah Kiner-Falefa (“The Falafel King”) were all good for vibes at some point or another and now they’re all gone. The organisation, the fanbase and daresay even the clubhouse are all united in hopes that all the money they’ve splashed this year will yield enough exceptional baseball to lift the Bombers back to glory. Maybe Carlos Rodon will kvetch less. Maybe Marcus Stroman, whose sass I measured a little bit on the Cubs, will steal the hearts of the unforgiving Bleacher Creatures. Maybe this year the team will find a new Core Four, one it can build even a 3-year foundation on. A hint of bankable longevity, that would be nice.
Yesterday, Opening Day, was a little like dropping your kid at nursery school and hoping everything turns out alright — then getting a call about an hour later that little Timmy’s been harassing his classmates and already damaged some school property. Soto strutted onto the field as packaged. He didn’t do the Shuffle with as much sauce as usual, but he got on base quick and early with that trademarked feel for when the pitcher’s teasing the hitter out of the zone. Judge and Boone agree on the Captain batting third no matter who is or isn’t healthy at the top of the order, because the team recognises its dependency on home-runs in a home field built for hero ball. Think thus of tactical baseball: moon-shots are great, but they’re even better if someone’s laid the table with a smack or two upfield, for a couple populated bases.
Judge hit a ground ball for the double out, with the Astros pitcher Framber Valdez using Judge’s height against him (nothing new there …) to swing the fastball low and curvy. He hung it thereabouts to strike out Gleyber Torres and Giancarlo Stanton, every now and then able to actually perforate the strike-zone with zingers that only seemed to alter course at the last possible moment.
Filling in for the injured Cole, Nestor Cortes Jr. took the mound for the Yankees. I love the man and his Super Mario moustache but can’t help feeling there’s a sparkly disbelief in his eyes at times, that he’s a starting pitcher for the New York Yankees. He dealt as Valdez did, low and fast, but so far away from the strike-zone that successive Astros called his bluff after Yordan Alvarez sent a golf swing up centre-field. The bases were loaded off walks all of a sudden, and timely contact by Chas McCormick and Yainer Diaz had Houston up 3-nothing before the end of the 1st inning. By the bottom of the 2nd, Jake Myers had homered towards left-field. You couldn’t have asked for a worse start to a day in that ball-park, in Houston’s slightly bonkers, Ed Hopper painting of a stadium. During the next commercial break, I asked God if there was a way to make it so that 2025 free agent Juan Soto wasn’t watching.
At the top of the 5th inning, with the Astros up 4-nothing and the bases loaded with Yankees, Soto got his first league hit for the Bombers and the comeback was maybe, possibly, hopefully underway. It stalled briefly when Judge and Stanton both struck out to end the inning, and I’m sure hearts sunk all over the Eastern Seaboard. Anthony Rizzo martyr’d himself for a run, with a foul ball that fizzed him in the knuckles — the homegrown hope, Anthony Volpe, scored another on a walk and the score tightened up to 4-3.
Alex Verdugo, who was once a troublesome Red Sock, who taunted Yankee decency for years as a troublesome Red Sock, stepped into adequate conditions with the home crowd booing the procedural manner in which the visitors had cut the Astros lead. But he could only send the ball skipping towards first base for another easy but much less disappointing out. Oswaldo Cabrera, whose specific showbiz charm reminds me of the great Jorge Posada’s, homered to right field like he ties games to help keep the economy afloat, no big deal. The boos from the Astros faithful were louder, more delicious.
Verdugo came back at the top of the 7th inning to hit a ‘sacrificed’ fly off pitcher Ryan Pressly, where you — the batter — eat the out because the ball’s caught out of the air by the opposing defense. Houston couldn’t throw it home in time to prevent Judge from snatching the Yankees their first lead. This is exactly the brand of brutal, hard-worn baseball the club has to normalise again, every other working day.
That scoreline looked perilous in the 9th inning, especially with Astros loading the bases. Soto, who else, put the icing on the cake with a determined launch from right field to help tag out a Houston runner. Ball game, Yankees. Blood pressure, North of 80 last time I checked.
