BOSTON — Gentlemen (and ladies): start your baseball engines.
Consider the season officially on. Consider the winter a distant gleam at last, and consider the snow and the rain that tortured us the past few months nothing but a dim memory. If the Yankees and the Red Sox are playing ping-pong with the lead, if they are treating the basepaths like the Cross Bronx at rush hour and the scoreboard like a pinball machine, then we truly have achieved liftoff.
That doesn’t mean the script always works out, even for the Yankees, the team that has written the most successful baseball screenplays ever. Sometimes it works out the way this one did: The Yankees blowing a 5-1 lead behind CC Sabathia, then blowing a 7-5 lead behind reliever Chan Ho Park, ultimately falling 9-7 in front of 37,440 raucous onlookers who already had seen Pedro Martinez throw out a ceremonial first pitch and later listened to Neil Diamond belt out a ceremonial version of “Sweet Caroline.”
It was the 551st consecutive sellout at Fenway Park, and what seemed like the 5,551st consecutive game just like this one played between the ancient rivals. They do throw in a stinker or three every now and again. It just seems like they all work out this way.
“You hear about what these games are like,” is the way Curtis Granderson put it after taking part in his first Red Sox-Yanks skirmish. “And now I know.”
What can we glean from one game? Two things, really.
1. Both the Yankees and the Red Sox are going to score runs, in bunches, in batches, in barrels and kegs and grosses. These were two former Cy Young Award winners facing off, against each other, and neither made it out of the sixth inning and both surrendered five runs. Josh Beckett, who aspires to have the kind of year that can bring him a Sabathia-esque windfall, struck out only one batter. Sabathia, who already has his money, looked less like the October hero he was last year and more the big-game question mark he used to be in Cleveland.
2. The Yankees really do have flaws, as it turns out, and most of them are located in the bullpen. Sabathia didn’t do himself any favors, but none of the men who followed him had his back, either. We can offer David Robertson a break, because he inherited the tying run in the sixth and let him score.
We’ll be less charitable for Park, who served up a meatball that Dustin Pedroia tried to bash through the black night sky to tie the game in the eighth. Or to Damaso Marte, who wild-pitched the winning run to third that seemed to so spook Jorge Posada that the Yankees catcher committed a passed ball a few pitches later that allowed the go-ahead to score.
Or Joba Chamberlain, who suffered acute carryover from a difficult spring and let in an insurance run in the eighth, who further muddies the waters regarding the question that will most affect Joe Girardi in the early stage of this year: Who’s the bridge to Mariano Rivera? Who nurses the lead?
It was a question Girardi didn’t have to face thanks to Park surrendering the last lead of the night, on a pitch he described as “one that was supposed to be up and in but drifted over the plate. And [Pedroia] found the smallest part of the park.”
Girardi, smartly, opted for the sane approach.
“It’s one game either way,” the manager said. “Even if all our relievers had strung nothing but zeroes, it’s still only one game and doesn’t say anything definitive, one way or another.”
What it does say is this: Even the prettiest girl at the dance might have a pimple concealed on her forehead. Even the biggest man on campus might have a hidden stutter. And even the Yankees, as well crafted as their roster is, with all the swagger and all the success they bring into this season, have flaws. They are fixable flaws over the course of 161 more games, but they are there and they are visible.
Now they get to address them. Consider the season officially on.