Underdogs, eh?
The Yankees. The New York Yankees. The Bronx Bombers. Murderer’s Row. Damn Yankees. Evil Empire. All of it. Underdogs …
. . .
. . .
. . .
Sorry, had to take a few paragraphs there to compose myself. It’s hard to laugh and type at the same time. Thank goodness for CC Sabathia, who will throw the first pitch of the 2011 season today at Yankee Stadium at the Tigers’ Austin Jackson. With chatter all over the clubhouse about how these Yankees are entering this season in the unfamiliar role of chasers rather than chased, he was asked who he liked this year.
“Us,” he said.
To make the playoffs? To win the wild card?
“To win the whole thing,” he said. “I wouldn’t show up if I didn’t believe that.”
Yes, it is good to hear a reasonable voice, a rational voice among the all the silliness of a spring that feels like it’s lasted longer this year, somehow, than in years past, even if Opening Day beats April to the punch by a day this time around.
Look, is it feasible that the Yankees aren’t as talented, as deep, as well-rounded as the Red Sox? Sure it is. The Sox spent the winter like a hungry man at the Golden Corral, throwing piles of cole slaw and peel-and-eat shrimp and bowls of pudding on the tray, worrying how to deal with it all later.
In other words, while the Yankees were being left at the altar by Cliff Lee, the Red Sox were spending their winter blissfully impersonating the Yankees.
And that’s good. It’s good for baseball (at least our small corridor of it, which is always more interesting when the Yankees and Red Sox are engaged in an arms race). It’s good for the Yankees-Red Sox “rivalry” which, let’s be honest, has grown stale and stagnant in the seven years since they last met in the postseason.
And maybe it’s good for the Yankees, too.
Even if it it’s ridiculous to think of a team that will field the lineup the Yankees will field every day this year (barring injury, of course) as anyone’s idea of an underdog, even if the AL East likely will yield a lot fewer gimmes this year if we are to believe in the dual rises of Baltimore and Toronto, even if the Yankees do the unthinkable and simply do what they did last year and settle for the wild card.
“This year feels like every year, man,” Derek Jeter said yesterday. “I think we have a really good team.”
Look, nothing is guaranteed to anyone, no matter how carefully crafted the plan. Nobody knows that better than the Red Sox, who somehow won 89 games last year despite a roster that sometimes looked like the set of “Nurse Jackie,” a lineup that simply ran out of players at various points last summer.
Even the Yankees got a taste of that, late, when they lost Mark Teixeira in the ALCS at the worst possible moment.
It’s Opening Day, a secular holiday that should never obscure the fact that it’s a circuitous six-month march between now and Game 1 of the playoffs. Stuff happens in six months. There will be at least two players on the Sox and two players on the Yankees by then who aren’t here now, and that we know with certainty.
And this we do, too:
Calling the Yankees underdogs is like calling Ali an underdog to Joe Frazier in Manila; it may technically be right. But once the games start for real, it’s also beside the point.
And it’s about time for the games to start for real.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com