Yankee Stadium felt like capital of baseball again during home opener

There were still enough kids in the stands that when the ball flew off Alex Verdugo’s bat and into the gray, late-afternoon sky, there was an audible, anticipatory squeal that accompanied it on its path toward the outfield wall.

Later, they’ll listen to their parents and they’ll learn the cardinal rules of fly balls at baseball games: look at the outfielder. He’ll tell you how far it’s been hit. So if you looked out to right field, you saw George Springer ease back toward the warning track. You saw the ball die maybe 15 feet in front of the fence. You saw the ball settle into Springer’s glove.

And so the Yankees weren’t going go with the sports-movie script, weren’t going to tie the game and send the remnants of the Opening Day crowd of 47,812 into a frothy frenzy. They were going to lose, 3-0, to the Blue Jays, wasting a terrific start from Marcus Stroman. So far, the summary for the Yankees season eight games in looks like this:

They score, they win.

But they didn’t score, not in the ninth inning, not against Yusei Kikuchi, who dueled Stroman pitch for pitch across 5 ¹/₃ innings, not all day. They’ve lost two games so far this year and they’ve been shut out both of them. It’s too early to read too much into it. But it’s worth noting and filing it away.

“The crowd was ready to go, ready to erupt,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “But we could never get the offense going to really blow the roof off.”