Baseball fans waited four months for Opening Day, but Mother Nature only gave 'em two hours before putting a halt to the first official game of the 2020 MLB season.
No matter, as in Game 1 of 900 on the 2020 schedule, the New York Yankees defeated the Washington Nationals, 4-1, in a rain-shortened five innings, giving Gerrit Cole his first win in pinstripes.
The game was just under two hours old when it went into a rain delay with one out in the sixth, rain pouring down fast and furious at Nationals Park thanks to a vicious thunderstorm that, just before suspension, gave the visual of a lightning bolt striking in the distance behind commissioner Rob Manfred, who was being interviewed on the ESPN broadcast.
After a 90-minute delay, which included a virtual waterfall cascading off the upper deck in left field and knee-deep water in the dugouts, the grounds crew took the tarp off the field – but soon put it back on, and the game was called just before 11 p.m.
Under MLB rules modified for this year, games that are called before they are official, or games that are called when they are official but are tied, will be resumed from the point of stoppage – however, this game had gone the full five, so it was deemed official, and, thus, ended.
Still, Yankees fans had to like what they saw from Cole, who may not have had his sharpest stuff (as noted by John Flaherty on YES' post-game show), but in five innings, Cole needed just 75 pitches to retire 15 of the 18 Astros batters he faced, five via strikeout. The $324 million man did allow a solo homer to Adam Eaton, but that was the only hit he allowed – he did walk one and hit a batter – and he retired 10 in a row between hitting Eric Thames in the second and walking Asdrubal Cabrera in the fifth.
"Really good, and I really felt like he improved as he went," manager Aaron Boone said of Cole after the game. "He was probably battling all the excitement and buildup to this day, but I thought he settled into a nice groove, and stuff-wise, I thought he was really good."
The offensive star of the game was Giancarlo Stanton, who got the Yankees on the board with a monstrous two-run homer in the first, and then drove in the final run with a rocket single to right in the fifth.
"That was about as good of a start as you can get to a game," Boone said. "That's a huge shot in the arm when you're facing another team's ace, and you have your ace on the mound. A huge tone-setter by G."
Tyler Wade, who started at second base in place of DJ LeMahieu, also made his impact felt, walking and scoring on an Aaron Judge double in the third and then dropping a bunt single to keep the Yankees' fifth-inning rally going.
For the Nats, Max Scherzer struck out 11 – his strikeout of Gary Sanchez for the only out of the sixth counts for stats, as the game was "official" at that point – to mark his third career Opening Day start with 10 or more strikeouts, and Eaton did homer – but that was about all the highlights on a night where, in a "regular" season, they would've been raising their 2019 World Series banner in front of a raucous sellout crowd.
However, the unfortunate stars of the night overall were Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose ceremonial first pitch was the first viral moment of the 2020 season for all the wrong reasons, and Mother Nature, who stole 23 outs from a night that the world had waited nearly a third of a calendar year for.
Still, for the first of hopefully many times this season, the WFAN broadcast of the game ended (in theory) with the most important sentence in the vocabulary of John Sterling: "Ballgame over. Yankees win! THEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE Yankees, WIN!"
Follow Lou DiPietro on Twitter: @LouDiPietroWFAN
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