BOSTON — The advice always has been the same, no matter who the player, no matter where he came from. You want to survive in New York, kid? You want to make it in the big town? You want to be king of the hill, A-number-one, top of the heap?
“Be yourself,” Curtis Granderson said, smiling a smile that said it was advice he has heard over and over again. “Don’t be someone you’re not and you’ll be fine. That’s what the people have all told me.”
Manager Joe Girardi was one of those people, because there was a time, 14 years ago, when he was brought to New York from Colorado and handed the starting catcher’s job, one that had previously belonged to a popular Yankee named Mike Stanley. Yankees fans, still starved by a 17-year championship drought that seemed certain to extend infinitely, howled.
And Girardi pressed.
“I tried to do things I wasn’t capable of doing at first,” he said. “And I suffered.”
Granderson will do no such suffering, not after this series against the Red Sox, in which he introduced himself in the most appropriate way possible. On Opening Night he crushed a home run off Josh Beckett over the bullpen in right field in his very first bat in the road gray uniform, “New York” across the front, an awfully nice way to say hello.
Then there was last night, top of the 10th inning, Jonathan Papelbon on the mound, Fenway Park making the unique kind of clamor that it seems to reserve specifically for the Red Sox closer.
The people were loud, they were raucous, they were certain Papelbon would set the Yankees down in order, that the home team would take care of whatever the Yankees threw at them in the bottom of the inning . . .
. . . and then . . .
Well, and then Granderson stepped into a Papelbon fastball, and he did what he does to right-handed pitching across the American League. He laid a charge into it. He drilled it high and far and to just about the same part of the Fenway bleachers as he did the other night. And in a heartbeat, in an eyeblink, the plug was kicked out of the wall at Fenway Park, Granderson was circling the bases, and the Yankees dugout behind third base was electric and alive.
On the radio, John Sterling cooed, “The Grandy-man can!”
Nobody had ever hit two home runs off Papelbon in his career. But now Granderson has. He gave the Yankees a 2-1 lead that would swell to 3-1 and become a final soon thereafter — a second win in these three games against the Red Sox, an opening salvo in a season in which these teams are certain to get in each other’s way all across six months, as they always do.
“We know that they’re going to give us everything they can whenever we play, same as we will when we play them,” Granderson said. “It’s just good to be a small part of this.”
No, Granderson isn’t Reggie, and he won’t fill your notebook with sparklers after hitting the game-winning blast. Not his way. Not his style. He is not the perfect player, a fact that’s on display every time he steps to the plate against a left-hander, where entering last night he was hitting .158 since last June and, more amazingly, slugging .158 since then. Yes, in close to 10 months, he hasn’t had an extra base hit against a southpaw.
Eventually, we’ll have to discover if the Yankees will be able to keep Granderson’s energy and his joie de vivre in the lineup every day, nine innings a night. But those are other concerns for other days. On this day, Granderson wakes up as the man who struck the key blow in allowing the Yankees to win a game from the Red Sox, 3-1, and to take two out of three to start the season.
All that other stuff? There’s 159 more games to figure that stuff out.