#Yankees, Nationals and baseball provide hope in surreal opener

WASHINGTON — It began with a sublime display of unity, hope and gratitude, two of the game’s best franchises showing off their social consciousness on the Nationals Park field.

It concluded with that same field covered by a rain-soaked tarp featuring the garish logo for Skittles, the candy that ruins your teeth.

Baby steps.

The Yankees prevailed in Major League Baseball’s long-awaited return Thursday night, Gerrit Cole succeeding in his debut as he threw five innings of one-hit ball for a 4-1 victory over the defending champion Nationals at an empty Nationals Park. After the epically unprecedented coronavirus delayed Opening Day by nearly four months, a very familiar D.C. summer thunder shower cut the action short just an hour and 43 minutes into the contest, giving Cole a cheap complete game. Point of interest: Last year, the platform campaign that convinced the Yankees to commit $324 million to him, Cole recorded zero complete games.

Hal Steinbrenner’s other massive investment, Giancarlo Stanton, kicked off his third Yankees season in robust fashion, taking Nats ace Max Scherzer deep in the first inning for a two-run, 459-foot blast and adding an RBI single in the fifth. Point of interest: Last year, the injury-prone Stanton didn’t record his first RBI, let alone his third, until June 22, when he drove home four runs to help beat the Astros.

Throw in a pair of hits by Aaron Judge, including an RBI double in the third, and a terrific drag bunt single by DJ LeMahieu’s second-base backup Tyler Wade that preceded Judge’s two-bagger, and the Yankees departed the premises with plenty of positive impressions to carry them through Friday’s off day.

Most of all, they could be proud of their role in a wonderful pregame ceremony that, after the Nats raised their 2019 title flag (such a sad act without fans to witness it), highlighted baseball’s welcome graduation into wokehood. Kudos to the Yankees for conceiving the idea of kneeling en masse, the Nats joining them, for a minute prior to the playing of the national anthem. Kudos to MLB for embracing former Yankee (and current Phillie) Andrew McCutchen’s suggestion for a “moment of unity,” with everyone holding onto a 200-yard piece of fabric. And while Dr. Anthony Fauci threw as horrid a first pitch as you’ll ever see, sending his catcher Sean Doolitle scurrying toward the backstop to retrieve the errant toss, the infectious-disease expert nevertheless earned his moment in the spotlight, standing strong against our country’s rising tide of anti-intellectualism.

Those good vibes transitioned smoothly into a good game, Cole battling through a lack of command benefiting from a weak Nats lineup that lost Juan Soto to a positive COVID-19 test on Thursday morning (no, the virus isn’t going away) and the Yankees going an acceptable 2-for-7 with runners in scoring position. If anything, the rain delay raised one question that Mets broadcaster Howie Rose posed on Twitter: If the idea is to get the teams in and out of the stadiums as quickly as possible, then why did they make them hang around for almost two hours before calling it?

Alas, we’re all learning as we go forward here. We’ll take the hour and 43 minutes of baseball, the homers (the Nats’ Adam Eaton tagged Cole in the bottom of the first for Washington’s only hit), the strikeouts (11 by Scherzer despite taking the loss). We’ll take a sport more committed to making the world a better place.

We’ll pass on the Skittles, but hey, the Nats have bills to pay like the rest of us. Again, baby steps. If we aren’t sure where we’re headed, it feels great just to be on a journey.