“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do: I stare out the window and wait for spring.”
— Rogers Hornsby
Thursday morning the sun is scheduled to arrive right on time, and it is slated for a lonely place in the blue Bronx sky, no clouds, just a 40-degree reminder that while it may look like the middle of summer at 1:05 p.m., it is still just the early hours of spring.
They will come pouring in off the platforms of the 4 train and the D train, they will come cruising off the Deegan and into the parking garages. They will come early, some 46,000 strong, because there is no greater civic holiday in New York than Opening Day at Yankee Stadium.
That’s been true since the first day they opened the doors on the old Stadium, the one that stood sentry for so many decades next door from this one. A few days before that sacrosanct moment in Yankees history — April 18, 1923 — Babe Ruth had gotten his first good look at the inviting porch in right field for which he had served as the muse.
“I’d give a year of my life,” Ruth said, “if I could hit a home run on Opening Day of this great new park.”
Then in the bottom of the third inning that day, with two outs, with Whitey Witt on third base and Jumpin’ Joe Dugan on first and the Yankees holding a 1-0 lead on the Red Sox, Boston’s Howard Ehmke tried to sneak Strike 3 past Ruth on a 2-2 pitch. Ruth had other ideas. One mighty swat later the Yankees led 4-0 on the way to a 4-1 win, and Ruth had a freshly written chapter in his growing legend.
A hundred years later the ballpark is smaller by about 30,000 seats and the opponent will be the Giants. Back in 1923, the Giants were the kings of New York, two-time defending champs, both World Series won at the Yankees’ expense. The Giants, in fact, were the reason Yankee Stadium was built at all; it was Giants skipper John McGraw who’d seen before anyone the looming threat of Ruth, and had ordered them out of the Polo Grounds.
Those Giants abandoned the city long ago, and forfeited the deed to New York baseball many years before that. In 2023, the Yankees retain that status, no matter how much ground the Giants’ spiritual stepchildren, the Mets, may have gained. For a baseball season to begin in earnest, they must start the clock for real at Yankee Stadium.
Thursday, just past 1:05 p.m., Gerrit Cole will start that clock for the Yankees, the first of a 162-game adventure that the Yankees genuinely believe will end on the other side of the Macombs Dam Bridge and then due south, in the Canyon of Heroes. In the 100th anniversary year of their very first title — those ’23 Yankees finally figured out McGraw’s Giants, in six games, that October — they try to add a 28th banner to the deepest championship collection in North American sports.
“We like who we are as a team,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said late in spring training. “We liked how we played a good portion of last year. Obviously it didn’t end the way any of us wanted it to end, but that’s what our mission is this year. There are a lot of guys in that room who have a lot of belief in what we want to accomplish.”
And there are a lot of guys in that room who ought to make that goal feasible. There is Cole, who sure seems due for a signature season in Year 4 as a Yankee. There is Aaron Judge, who had perhaps the single-most signature year of any Yankee in the last 60 years or so, a year in which he was the signature force, by a wide margin, in the whole sport.
There is, of course, Anthony Volpe, and when the Yankees are introduced and trot out along the first-base line Thursday it is hard to imagine anyone other than Judge getting a louder greeting from the faithful than Volpe, kid shortstop from Jersey, trying to recreate the path another kid shortstop from Jersey (by way of Kalamazoo, Mich.) once took, kid named Jeter.
There are plenty of immediate hurdles, sure, since three-fifths of the projected five-man rotation will begin the season on the IL. There is Harrison Bader, last October’s unlikeliest hero, who is battling back from his own injury.
But there is still plenty to enjoy here, starting Thursday, under brilliant sunshine, in the crisp cold of late March. No need to stare out the window any more. Spring is here. The Yankees are back.