Opening Day! What Does it Really Tell Us???

On an unusually warm early April evening (a wet dream for Al Gore’s rants), baseball was officially back! The 2010 baseball season kicked off with a main event; out of the gate, pitting the World Champion New York Yankees against their storied rival the Boston Red Sox. The pitching match-up had us prepped for a duel of epic proportions as the big Texan, Josh Beckett faced off against the powerful workhorse and 2007 Cy Young award winner, CC Sabathia. Of course though, its baseball, and all predictions can be immediately thrown out the window. This turned into an old fashion boxing match, with both teams going back and forth, with runs like two heavyweights going punch for punch in the center of the ring. In the end however, it was the Red Sox that came out on top after finally getting to CC, and then tearing up the Yankee bullpen. Chan-Ho Park (aka soon to be on line at the unemployment office) was simply awful, and we didn’t see much better from the newly castrated Joba Chamberlain and lefty Damaso Marte. Sports radio will talk about this loss all day today and newspapers will flood the back cover pages with the most cheese infested play on words or phrases like “Posa-DUH”. We’ve seen them all. What does this all mean? It means there are 161 games left in the season and Yankee fans should relax.
Now that the season is put into perspective, here is what Yankee fans need to do to silence those annoying Red Sox fans. To start off, you simply first tell them to pop in a Mentos to get rid of the Clam Chowder breath because lets face the facts… it is the fresh-maker. Then get down to business, and remind them that last year the Yankees lost their first eight games against the Red Sox, then went on to win the next nine out of ten, and of course win the World Series. Every year, fans and sports media go into a frenzy after the first couple of games, and then when July rolls around and they realize the season isn’t even half over, they probably have already forgotten about what happened in week one. I’ve seen World Series winners start years off 11-19, and I’ve seen teams start off 14-4 and not make the playoffs so let’s all just calm down a bit!
One thing that last night does show us is that the AL East is undoubtedly the beast division in baseball. The Yankees, Red Sox, and Rays are arguably the best three teams in the sport and are all fighting in the same division. It was enjoyable to watch the Yankees and Red Sox duke it out last night because honestly, it is the showcase of the best talent in MLB. If you met someone who never heard of baseball, you would without a shadow of a doubt show them a game between the Yankees and Red Sox because you are always guaranteed a full fledged battle of the best talent in the sport, layered with plenty of moments of sheer excitement and drama. A perfect example of this is game 7 of the 2003 ALCS, when Aaron Boone hit a floating knuckleball off of Tim Wakefield into the left field seats at Yankee stadium to send them to the World Series. That moment literally knocked the wind out of me when it happened! So, does the first game of the year really tell us anything about who is going to win the World Series this year?…..Absolutely not. But it does tell us that we are in store for at least nineteen epic battles between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, the greatest rivalry in the history of sports.