Yankees back for ‘Re-Opening Day,’ return to Stadium on high-note
Last summer, the sounds of the city echoed through the stadium. The fake fan noise they played for television could not drown out the sound of the D train clattering by or honking horns on the street. The squealing tires and more than occasional fireworks were a reminder that the 2020 season was just not right.
Friday night was the first time since September 2019 the Yankees hoped they would feel like they were home. With New York reaching the 70% adult vaccination rate and COVID-19 restrictions being lifted, the Yankees could throw open the gates at the Stadium — a ballpark notoriously tough for visiting teams because of the fans — to full capacity.
“That’s what we’ve been waiting for. I think, especially since the start of 2020 and playing in the stadium with no fans, they played the fake crowd noise, but that doesn’t compare not even close to what a packed house at Yankee Stadium any night brings,” Yankees slugger Aaron Judge said. “So I think being on the road and seeing a couple of the stadiums with full capacity kind of got us juiced up. So we’re ready to roll them in front of the best fans in the world. So it’s gonna be a fun night tonight.”
It was not a full house in the Bronx Friday night, with large swaths of empty seats around the stadium. The Yankees, however, celebrated Friday night as “Re-Opening Day” and with that they wanted to show off a renewed Yankees team. They left the Bronx 12 days before an inconsistent, un-energetic team that had just been swept by the Red Sox at home for the first time in over a decade.
While the eight-game road trip through Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Buffalo ended up being a winning one — they went 5-3 — for the Yankees, they had moments where they had to look themselves in the mirror. There were tough walk-off losses and there were some meetings where players, coaches and even manager Aaron Boone were emotional.
Judge said the gist of those meetings were “enough is enough” and they were tired of talking about slow starts and getting back to themselves eventually. He said the conclusion was “eventually’s gotta be now.”
Through that, the Yankees felt it was important they returned looking more like the team they were built to be. They looked like The Bombers again.
“I think our offense is gaining a little bit of traction,” Boone said. “And that for much of this year has been a little bit of a struggle for us. So I think they’ve started to build that traction and gain some of that little bit of that swagger back. To have games on this trip that we just came back... even some games that we lost, where I felt like the offense played a big role, and we had some comebacks in us, which we we haven’t had a lot of that even when we were going through a month where we’re winning a lot of games. That was largely leaning on pitching and defense.
“But I feel like more and more the offense is coming to the party,” Boone said. “And I feel like we’re getting closer to what I hope is that juggernaut that I think we can be offensively. There’s no question that I feel like they’re gaining a little bit of that confidence as a group with each game with each time we string some quality at bats together.”
Over the eight-game road trip, the Yankees, who had scored the fewest runs in the American League when they left on the road trip, averaged 5.8 runs per game and slashed .269/.326/.503 with a .803 OPS. In the previous 60 games, the Yankees averaged 3.8 runs per game hitting .228/.315/.371.
And they didn’t show a lot of fight. In Buffalo, facing the Blue Jays, who were 6-3 against the Yankees going into the series, the Yankees fought back. They rallied from behind in each of the three games.
And Giancarlo Stanton said that is more like the Yankees that the fans they were welcoming back Friday night to the Stadium would remember.
“The team we’ve had the years in the past, we were never out of the game. Never,” Stanton said. “And this series definitely. It didn’t matter if we were up or down, we fought. That’s the mentality we got to have every night in and night out.”
According to Elias Sports Bureau, the Yankees have won at least three straight games after trailing in the seventh inning or later in each of them since a four-game stretch from from May 14-17, 2009.
