The rational person in me is saying "hey its two games, it could be in April, could be in August, pitchers are going to have a clunker of a game here and then, it just happened to be that our top two guys had them to start the season" but that doesn't make my gut feel any less bit sick as I watched my Yankees absolutely shit the bed again last night against the goddamn Baltimore Orioles, losing 7-5 (it wasn't reallly that close) and start the season by falling flat on their face.
As someone who considers himself a student of the game and looking at things objectively, I hate the knee jerk reaction of fans and media alike who take too much of a small sample size in baseball and try to say something quantiative about a team. Indeed, as you hear so often, its a long season, on any given night in a 162 game season a guy can have a flat out lousy night, a whole team just looking off, does that make them a bad team? Does that make a player a bad player? Hardly, but for a fan like me who watches them so faithfully, attempting to rationalize two horrible, awful defeats to one of the worst teams in the league is a hard pill to swallow. Sure, it is just two games, and these two pithers, CC Sabbathia and Wang have extensive bodies of work in this league that show that they are effective and in fact above average pitchers in this league, but I just want to scream at them "can't you wait until May or something for that one really bad game? Can't we start this season on the right foot?" Unfortuately for me, or fortunately for yankee haters everywhere, this was not to be this first week.
Of course, there's always tommorrow, they can just turn it on with Burnett on the mound, rebound and look great and steamroll the rest of the season. Hell, the Phillies looked godawful for two and a half games, only to make a comeback late in the game. Believe me I watched it, and it was a thing of beauty how a team seemingly just looked lost for so long just seemed to click all at once and put it together for a dramatic victory, and that's baseball. On a given day even world champions can look like a bunch of bush leaguers, but these are professionals and if given even a small window of opportunity they can take advantage like the Phis did and sometimes there's no rhyme or reason why it happens.
Today is a new day for everyone, including the yankees and every other team out there. Anything can happen in this great game of baseball and it can even erase a great deal of bad in one fell swoop with a few magic moments, but until then all I'm left with is this pain from the proverbial stomach punch Nick Markakis and the Lowly Orioles gave me last night. I hope they make the best of it.
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