Friday, July 24, 2020
At last, Opening Day, But…
At long enough last came Opening Day. Well, Opening Night. On which New York Yankees right fielder Aaron Judge nailed the COVID-19-delayed season's first hit and his teammate Giancarlo Stanton nailed its first home run two batters later.
On which the Washington Nationals opened without a key element, outfielder Juan Soto, whose positive COVID-19 test result came back well enough before game time to make him a scratch.
Before that rain-shortened game even got started, the word came from the opposite coast that Clayton Kershaw was scratched from his Opening Night start thanks to a back problem sending him onto the injured list.
In Washington, the Nats' co-ace Max Scherzer would have loved if Judge and Stanton were Thursday night scratches. They accounted for all Yankee runs in the 4-1 final shortened in the top of the sixth when the rains smashed in with the Yankees having first and third and one out.
In San Francisco, Los Angeles Dodgers rookie Dustin May pitched five innings to San Francisco Giants veteran Johnny Cueto's four, both men leaving with a one-all tie, and the Dodgers' new $396 million man Mookie Betts broke the tie scoring on an infield ground out in the top of the seventh.
Scherzer's good news Thursday night: eleven strikeouts. His bad news: four walks, an inability to solve Judge and Stanton, and his teammates' inability to solve Gerrit Cole. Judge also doubled home Tyler Wade in the third and Stanton singled home Gio Urshela in the fifth. Remove Judge and Stanton from the Yankee lineup and the Nats' Adam Eaton's hefty solo home run in the bottom of the first would have been the game's only score.
Betts singled with one out in the top of the seventh and called for the ball. Published reports indicate that ball plus the evening's official lineup card now repose in his home. "It's just a new chapter in life," he told reporters after the 8-1 Dodgers win.
After he came home when Justin Turner grounded into a force out, Corey Seager's grounder got Cody Bellinger caught in a rundown at the plate, but Enrique Hernandez singled home Turner and Seager (who'd taken second during the rundown), Joc Pederson and A.J. Pollock walked back-to-back to load the pads, Austin Barnes sent Hernandez home with an infield hit, and Max Muncy walked Pederson home.
And, on both coasts, all four teams figured out a solution to the issue of whether or not to take a knee for "The Star Spangled Banner" that might actually help more than hurt the too-easily outraged.
Abetted by a suggestion from Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Andrew McCutchen, the Yankees and the Nats lined up on the base lines holding a long, long, long black ribbon, standing apart enough for social distance, then took their knees before "The Star Spangled Banner" was played.
On the same suggestion, the Dodgers and the Giants held a similar long, black ribbon and took their knees before the anthem's playing. In Washington, both the Yankees and the Nats rose from their knees while the anthem was played. In San Francisco, ten Giants including manager Gabe Kapler plus Betts on the Dodgers' side stayed on their knees during the anthem, with Bellinger and Muncy putting hands on Betts's shoulder as a gesture of support.
Two Scientific American writers, Jeremy Adam Smith and Dacher Keltner (whose surname is also that of the infielder who helped stop Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak), once observed that first-glance research indicated "nothing threatening about kneeling."
"Instead, kneeling is almost always deployed as a sign of deference and respect. We once kneeled before kings and queens and altars; we kneel to ask someone to marry, or at least men did in the old days. We kneel to get down to a child's level; we kneel to beg.
"While we can't know for sure, kneeling probably derives from a core principle in mammalian nonverbal behavior: make the body smaller and look up to show respect, esteem, and deference ... Kneeling can also be a posture of mourning and sadness. It makes the one who kneels more vulnerable. In some situations, kneeling can be seen as a request for protection."
But kneeling during the playing of "The Star Spangled Banner" at the beginning of a sports event became a trigger of outrage when then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick did so in a gesture of protest against real police killings of real, unarmed African-American men.
The knee for the anthem has revived in the wake of George Floyd's murder by a Minneapolis police officer. It still is the kind of trigger that got Kaepernick into hot water, most recently when several Giants including their manager did so before an exhibition game. "I see nothing more patriotic," said Gabe Kapler to reporters, "than peaceful protests when things are frustrating and upsetting."
During the initial outrage, a fire onto which a certain president poured gasoline by demanding publicly the firing of Kaepernick and anyone else of similar mind and gesture, it seemed too simple to see the gesture as equivalent to grinding the American flag under the heel.
Smith and Keltner noticed something to which nobody else paid much mind if at all: "[W]ith a single, graceful act, Kaepernick invested it with a double meaning. He didn't turn his back as the anthem was played, which would have been a true sign of disrespect. Nor did he rely on the now-conventionalized black-power fist."
The fist first raised in tandem by Olympic gold medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Games, even as both men kept their heads bowed on the medal podium. And a thought is provoked: Would those screaming bloody murder over a knee taken during "The Star Spangled Banner" prefer the raised clenched fist as a protest? A flag burning on the field? A riot, with or without looting and plundering included?
Of course they wouldn't. Neither would you. Neither would I. We should acknowledge that the Giants didn't turn their backs as "The Star-Spangled Banner" played, either. Neither did Joey Votto and several fellow kneeling Cincinnati Reds teammates before an exhibition against the Detroit Tigers. Neither did the Yankees and the Nats, nor the Dodgers and the Giants, when they arose for the anthem's playing. It's not impossible to consider that a gesture of quiet protest before the anthem and the flag is not the exactly same thing as a protest against the anthem or the flag.
But if only Kaepernick had thought in the first place to take his original knee before the anthem played, would that have worked very differently for himself and the outraged?
You don't have to subscribe to every last clause or every last impulse of the social justice warriors to agree that rogue police doing murder is not what the land of the free and the home of the brave was supposed to mean. Neither must you subscribe to the formal Black Lives Matter movement itself to agree that black lives and all lives don't deserve to end when those entrusted to uphold the law break it instead.
It'd be far better for baseball to limit playing "The Star Spangled Banner" to before games on Opening Days, games played on significant national holidays, the All-Star Game, and Games 1 and (if it goes that far) 7 of the World Series. Not so much to cut back on the kneeling protests, but to re-emphasize that patriotism compulsory is patriotism illusory.
Back on the field, Soto's COVID-19 positive test approaching Opening Night shook the game up just enough to provoke serious questions as to how MLB is going to navigate even this truncated season without further medical issues. And, whether the most stringent health and safety protocols will keep more Sotos from turning up positive.
Other surrealities include the empty stands, other than cardboard cutouts of fans in the seats, and the canned crowd sounds at the ballparks. The coronavirus world tour already turned baseball into something between The Twilight Zone and the Mad Hatter's tea party. Now that the season is underway at last, should we throw Alfred Hitchcock Presents into the mix?
At least neither Opening Night game went to extra innings, so we didn't have to deal right off the bat with the free cookie on second base awarded each team to start its extra half-inning. The mischief that'll inspire will just have to wait.
Funny thing, though, about that equally nefarious three-batter minimum for pitchers. Two Giants relievers faced the minimum in that 5-run Dodger seventh before surrendering any runs. If bullpen preservation was part of it even if those two got pried, I can see already that this dumb rule isn't going to end well for Kapler and other managers.
And, let's be real, the PA people in charge of the piped-in sounds are only human, after all. Who's going to be the first poor sap having to live down the accident of cranking up the wild cheering when the home team's batter gets hit by a pitch?
On the other hand, it was easy enough to feel normal again once the Yankees and the Nats got underway ... when home plate umpire Angel Hernandez began blowing pitch calls. Calling a few strikes balls and a few balls strikes? That's about par for the course for him. So when's that umpire accountability coming at last?
Before the game, Dr. Anthony Fauci — otherwise doing his best to battle a pandemic involving both a stubborn virus and a political (lack of) class that surely makes him wonder if he was really there when all this happened--threw out a ceremonial first pitch. Later, he was seen in the stands with his Nats-themed face mask off his face a spell. What's up with that, Doc?
You'd love to say Fauci threw a perfect strike to Nats relief pitcher Sean Doolittle behind the plate, but you'd be lying like an office holder. Fauci's delivery is described politely as resembling a man trying to compensate for a fractured upper arm. The ball sailed almost to the on-deck circle. Rumor has it that Hernandez called it a strike on the outside corner.