Opening Day Photoblog

I was at Opening Day on Monday, the kind of experience that never gets tired. My notes of what went down are up at Baseball Prospectus as a Game of the Week piece--as free basic content. Here's the required taste:

• Speaking of upsets, who had 1:16 PM ET in the pool on when Alex Rodriguez would start getting booed? With two outs and Cark Crawford on base in the first inning, Rodriguez had trouble seeing a foul pop-up off of the bat of first baseman Ty Wigginton. Rodriguez got a late break, then overran the ball for an error, and you’d have thought Project A13 never existed. Happy Opening Day, Alex!

• Twelve minutes later, it was Rodriguez at the plate with two men on and one out in the bottom of the first. As the count went full, a fan behind us hissed “If he strikes out looking here, he’s done. For the season, it’s over.” Again, this was inning one of game one. Fortunately for Rodriguez’s season, he struck out swinging rather than looking, flailing away at a low-90s fastball from Scott Kazmir. The runners eventually came around to score on a Jason Giambi single.

For follow-up I wrote a few additional notes over on BP's Unfiltered...er, blogthingie that they don't want to call a blog. The taste of that (as with all Unfiltered content, that, too is free):

Best Moment of the Day: With not only Lidle, but remembrances for Bowie Kuhn and Hank Bauer at the beginning of the program, things were pretty somber at the Stadium to start the day. So when the Stadium video screen started on a tribute to Bobby Murcer, who was diagnosed with brain cancer less than four months ago, I was ready to get bummed out again–until they showed Murcer, minus quite a bit of hair but looking pretty good otherwise, in the YES Network broadcast booth. Probably the most heartfelt standing ovation I’ve seen, for something that didn’t happen on the field.

But wait, there's more! More brother and I had our cameras, so we snapped a few pics to go along with all this prose:


Here, courtesy of my brother JJ, is a shot from the IRT train platform outside the Stadium. One of the things I discussed in my Game of the Week column was the joy of seeing the ballpark come into view as the 4 Train goes elevated approaching the 161st Street Station. Usually, you can hear a buzz in the subway car as the Stadium pops into view. (Yesterday, however, we were pressed into the Subway like sardines. The only sound as we rolled into the station was the sound of people preparing to exhale).

Here (again, courtesy of JJ) is a view of River Ave, and the creatures waiting to get into the bleachers.








This one's one of mine: the new Stadium, embryonic view. Right now it looks like an extensive (not to mention expensive) collection of wooden scaffolds. Sadly, it won't remain that way, or magically transform itself back into a park.








Another one of mine, this time the Yanks and Rays lined up after the announcements--just moments away from the start of the season.









...and three hours later, we're off to never-never land. This shot (courtesy of JJ, who as you can probably tell by now has a better camera and way better skills than I do) is the final pitch of the game, Mariano Rivera delivering to B.J. Upton. Rivera was absolutely throwing darts out there, pumping fastball after fastball 95 MPH.