You try to be cool about things, to take it all in stride, because that’s half the battle about being in the big leagues: proving you belong in the big leagues, that you aren’t Moonlight Graham, up for a sip of coffee and then on with your life.
Yes. That’s the plan.
And then a funny thing happens: You’re staring out at Clay Buchholz, who was only one of the best pitchers in the sport a year ago. It’s the bottom of the fifth, and the Yankees are up 2-0 on their ancient rivals, the Red Sox, and let’s be honest: Most of the 42,821 inside Yankee Stadium are yawning away the minutes, waiting for the No. 9 batter in the order to excuse himself.
“All you want to do,” Dean Anna will say later, “is to relax. Stay back on the ball. Approach these at-bats the way you approached every at-bat your whole life.”
Here comes a fastball, not one of Buchholz’s best. Anna may not be the best-known Yankee to ever fill a locker on 161st Street and River Avenue, but he has collected 528 hits in six minor league seasons, he led the Pacific Coast League in batting average last year, hitting .331 for Tucson, the Padres’ top affiliate.
And he actually teaches hitting, too, in the offseason, at a baseball academy run by Bo Jackson in Lockport, Ill.
“It’s not as if I’ve never made contact before,” he will say with a laugh.
He makes contact here, and it’s funny: It is a no-doubter in every way. And yet Anna isn’t 100 percent sure. And it is as if those 42,821 are looking at an optical illusion, staring into the sun, unable to process what they’re seeing, their voice boxes unable to catch up …
Until they do.
Until the baseball disappears into a tangle of hands and arms in the right-field seats, until Dean Anna is well into his trot around the bases, trying to stay calm, trying to stay cool, trying to shrug it off as nothing, while the whole time, the whole trip, he’s thinking to himself, the words ricocheting around his brain:
“AM I REALLY RUNNING AROUND THESE BASES?”
“Pretty surreal,” he will say later. “Pretty special.”
He jogs back to the dugout, having hit a home run for the Yankees against the Red Sox, first of his career, trying to process that, and he looks up and the first guy to greet him, first guy to extend a hand, is Derek Jeter.
“Attaboy,” says the captain, who now sits just 3,323 hits ahead on the all-time list.
Yeah. Attaboy. Look, it may well turn out that this is the extent of Dean Anna’s contributions to the 2014 Yankees. A year ago, after all, he started the season in Tucson as a backup, and 26-year-old minor-league backups rarely get the Frank Merriwell treatment in real life.
There were more important developments during this feel-good 4-1 schooling of the Sox, of course, from Michael Pineda and his bag of tricks (and perhaps a dollop or two of special sauce) to Brian McCann’s first big hit as a Yankee to David Phelps’ splendid 2 ¹/₃ innings of perfect relief. Those are all elements that will carry or collapse these Yankees across the next 152 games.
But it’s going to be hard to feel better about anyone else. Dean Anna’s smile said that much, as he reached for his cell phone, already jammed with over 100 callers and texters. He was already looking forward to the clubhouse clearing so he could reach out to his parents and his fiancée, Fanny Gideon, who was working a shift as a nurse back in Arizona.
“She knew she was going to miss the first few innings but I think she probably got off work in time to see that,” Anna said. “I think she probably enjoyed that.”
They all did. The one thing all major leaguers share is a steel-trap memory for milestones and moments.
“We all remember our first home run,” said Joe Girardi, like Anna an Illinoisan (who hit his first home run Jun 29, 1989, in Candlestick Park against the Giants’ Jeff Brantley). “And he hit his in a pretty special place. He’ll have that forever.”
At least that long.