Opening Day – By Jon Schwartz

Opening the Perfect Present

(This story originally appeared in the May 2021 edition of Yankees Magazine.)

Six months later, it’s weird to look back on Opening Day; I had already forgotten that there were just 10,000 fans at Yankee Stadium that day. But the thing is, even that was amazing at the time. After a deeply upsetting year, least of all for baseball reasons, it was completely amazing to be back at Yankee Stadium, listening to real fans have real conversations and real cheers. The “roll call” was incredible.

I chose to write this story backwards for two reasons: First, it’s not super fun to build up to an eventual loss in a publication like Yankees Magazine. It’s not that often I write about a single game for a long, 3,000-plus-word feature, but it’s even less common for me to write about a loss. So since I wasn’t going to climax with some sort of dramatic victory, it made sense to get rid of that fact early.

But I also loved the emotion from the line that I chose to end with, the idea of welcoming fans back to Yankee Stadium. I think that the was the 118th season in Yankees history, so there have been plenty of Opening Days. But I’m not sure there has ever been one like 2021. There certainly hasn’t been anything like a return to baseball after a year spent playing in front of empty seats. So this year’s curtain-raiser was always going to be special, no matter what happened on the field.

There’s baseball in here, sure. There’s a Gerrit Cole start, a Gary Sánchez rebirth, some fun during pregame introductions. But that’s stuff that we can get at any game. The truest joy in here is just writing about baseball, about baseball fans, and about a somewhat normal day at the ballpark.

https://www.mlb.com/news/yankees-magazine-2021-opening-day-recap

A New Path Forward

(This story originally appeared in the August 2020 edition of Yankees Magazine.)

It’s hard to explain how weird it is to be writing about baseball right now. The diversions I’ve taken in the past few months to writing music stories … those have just been so much easier. I’m not even totally sure about why — after all, one of the stories I wrote was about going to three concerts in London days before the world shut down due to COVID-19. I’m not sure that was any more responsible than a baseball game; in fact, it was certainly more dangerous.

But there’s the obvious fact that for a lot of us, the idea of baseball (or any American sports) coming back when the tri-state area was exploding in March and April was as some future reward for good behavior. If we stayed home like we were told, and if we did everything we could to let the virus run its course, we could get our normal lives back.

Instead, the situation today is objectively worse than it was even when the hospitals in New York City were overflowing. But here we are. If you can’t tell, I’m not thrilled about any of this, and it has felt really dirty these last few weeks to be putting out a magazine, even before Juan Soto tested positive on the day of the opener. You almost want it to rain, a feeling I’ve never before had on Opening Day. So it goes.

Anyhow!

My job demands that I enthusiastically welcome the return of the game that I do truly love. And I’m going to watch this season, cheering on some great stories, closely watching a Yankees team that should be legitimately special. So when I was assigned a story about the months that have led up to baseball returning, I didn’t want to go all Debbie Downer and pour cold water on everyone’s plans. Instead, I tried to look at some things we might not have been looking at that were going on while we should have been playing baseball.

For example, I spoke to YES Network executives about running a sports network without sports. I spoke to a minor league marketing executive about marketing a league that doesn’t really exist this year. I chatted with players about using their time away to protest and support the Black Lives Matter movement, and I spoke to another guy on the team about playing video games semi-professionally in the interim.

Like I’ve said, none of this is going to be easy. Maybe we should be playing, maybe we shouldn’t. But the fact is, we are. So we might as well enjoy it, because, for better — or more likely, for worse — baseball is back. Finally.

https://www.mlb.com/yankees/news/yankees-magazine-2020-season-begins

Open Season

(This story originally appeared in the May 2018 issue of Yankees Magazine.)

While I do travel quite a bit for stories, it’s pretty rare for me to actually join the team on the road during the season. Off the top of my head, I can think of two times since I started at Yankees Magazine that I reported on actual road games — the first was for my feature on Joe Girardi at the end of 2017, and the other was Opening Day 2018.

Something about the start of this season just felt important to me. Obviously, the Yankees had come so close in 2017, falling one game short of the World Series. And this was to be the first game for new manager Aaron Boone, as well as Giancarlo Stanton’s debut with the team. Plus, in the back of my head there was this sense that in the event this season turned out to be as special as Yankees fans and players were hoping, we should be there to document its first breaths.

So I flew to Toronto for a couple of days to watch the team work out for a last time in the preseason, then get things started the next day. The first couple weeks of April didn’t go so according to plan, but that first game sure did. Two homers from Stanton. An exceptional start by Severino. Handshakes to close things out.

We had fun covering the newness all around us; at times, it seemed like Boone had no idea what to do with his hands. He was so fidgety, constantly holding a bat or a ball. I tried to get all of my observations into the piece.

To keep the opening theme going, I also wrote about the curtain raising in the Bronx, even as it was delayed by a day due to snow. Once they got to play, it was Didi Gregorius leading the way, with a team-record 8 RBI from the shortstop position. Quite a debut, the first moments of what everyone hoped would be a truly special season.

Hope you’ll read and enjoy.

60-70 OPENING DAY FEATURE