It is among the oldest truisms regarding this sport that professionally dates to the late 1860s, and it goes something like this:
Every trip to the ballpark is an opportunity to see something on a baseball field you’ve never seen before.
Yankees fans at the Stadium have lived that in spades during the first two games of the regular season.
In Thursday’s season opener, Austin Wells became the first Yankee to lead off Opening Day with a home run and the first catcher in MLB history to lead off an opener with a homer.
Saturday afternoon’s 20-9 victory over the Brewers relegated the history made in that game a sidenote as the never-seen-before came fast, furious and frequently.
After Max Fried coasted through the top of the first inning — one of the few such innings by any pitcher who took the mound Saturday — the Yankees homered on the first three pitches they saw from former teammate Nestor Cortes.
First-pitch 90-mph fastball to the day’s leadoff hitter Paul Goldschmidt. Gone.
Another first-pitch 90-mph fastball to Cody Bellinger. Gone.
First-pitch cutter to Aaron Judge. Gone. Long gone.
To the tune of 468 feet to leftfield, among the longest blasts ever hit by Judge, who has made a career of tape-measure homers (and who added two more homers, including his ninth career grand slam).
MLB told The Associated Press that it marked the first time since the sport began tracking pitch counts in 1988 that a team homered on its first three pitches.
“Three pitches, three runs. Pretty rare,” Goldschmidt said in the understatement of the afternoon.
When Wells, batting sixth on this day because a lefthander was on the mound, homered on Cortes’ 16th pitch, it marked the first time in franchise history that the Yankees hit four homers in the first inning of a game.
When Oswald Peraza, pinch hitting in the seventh, hit a two-run shot to left, it gave the Yankees nine homers, the first time in their 123-year history that they’d hit that many in a game. They became the third team in MLB history to hit at least nine in a game. The Blue Jays hit 10 on Sept. 14, 1987, in an 18-3 win over the Orioles and the Reds hit nine on Sept. 4, 1999 in a 22-3 victory over the Phillies (Yankees manager Aaron Boone, then playing for Cincinnati, began the onslaught with a three-run homer off Paul Byrd).
The Yankees hit seven of their homers through the first 2 1/3 innings while taking a 13-3 lead. By then, Anthony Volpe had hit a three-run shot in the second, Judge had hit a grand slam in the third and Jazz Chisholm Jr. had hit a 442-foot shot in going back-to-back with Judge.
Former NFL Hall of Fame coach and renowned commentator John Madden was fond of saying, “Winning’s the great deodorant.”
And on this afternoon, the same could be said of the home runs, which provided cover for the Yankees in the field.
Out there, it was a slapdash five-error performance. Volpe, who committed one of two key errors in the Yankees’ fifth-inning implosion in Game 5 of the World Series last October against the Dodgers, contributed to an unearned run in the second with a wild throw on a relay to first on Brice Turang’s potential double-play grounder to second. Max Fried, a three-time Gold Glover during his eight seasons with Atlanta, two batters later made a dreadful throw to first that pulled Goldschmidt off the bag on what should have been an inning-ending comebacker by Christian Yelich.
Volpe, of course, won a Gold Glove at shortstop in his rookie year two seasons ago and Fried’s bona fides with a glove are fairly well established.
More concerning were the butchered balls by third baseman Pablo Reyes, who won a roster spot in spring training because he flashed some versatility in the field, yes, but mostly because is a righthanded hitter.
Getting the start for the switch-hitting Oswaldo Cabrera, Reyes committed two errors (Chisholm committed the Yankees’ fifth error in the first five innings). Reyes never looked fully comfortable at a position at which the Yankees spent the winter exploring upgrades, a market they are all but certain to continue exploring right up until the July 31 trade deadline.
Four of the six runs off Fried were unearned. That was a factor in his throwing 94 pitches and falling an out short of qualifying for a win even though the Yankees scored 16 runs in the first four innings.
“Obviously, we’ve got to catch the ball better,” Boone said.
Too much can get made from the early part of the 162-game season. Boone on Thursday called the opening week a “week of overreaction” to what happens, both good and bad.
But considering how inconsistent a defensive team the Yankees have been for several years running, and considering how that element of the game torpedoed them out of the playoffs in October, just how much the Yankees have improved defensively — their contention all winter — should be viewed with skepticism.
It didn’t completely wipe away the fun from an otherwise electric afternoon for the Yankees and their fans, but it can’t be completely ignored, either.
