It sounded like a complaint — well, it was, actually — but then Swisher, who is probably the Yankees’ leading enthusiast about life in general, grinned. “But hey, no better place than the Bronx, man.”
March is not going out quite as lamblike as the adage would have it, which makes the prospect of opening day in New York just a tad less idyllic than one might hope. When the Yankees face the Tigers on Thursday afternoon, the occasion is likely to be chilly, with temperatures in the 40s, and possibly very wet, with rain in the forecast.
As both teams ran through perfunctory workouts Wednesday, the Yankees made the unsurprising announcement that Brett Gardner would lead off and Derek Jeter would bat second against the Tigers right-hander Justin Verlander, though Jeter will lead off against lefties. Luis Ayala, the former Met, will take the final bullpen slot to start the season, replacing Pedro Feliciano, another former Met, who is on the disabled list. And it was still uncertain whether Curtis Granderson, recuperating from an injury to an oblique muscle, would start in center field.
Also, A. J. Burnett has a nasty head cold. “Don’t get too close to me, man,” he warned at one point.
Without a lot to discuss, talk naturally, or perhaps with a little prompting, turned toward the weather, long underwear, insulated batting gloves and sitting near the heaters on the bench. Asked how he prepared for playing in the cold, Jeter laughed.
“More clothes, man,” he said.
The idea of playing in a chilly rain did not excite Mark Teixeira. The good thing, he said, was that both teams have to play in it.
“But anyone who’s ever played golf when it’s raining and windy, you take it inside and play cards in the clubhouse,” Teixeira said, adding that cold weather is much tougher on hitters than pitchers. “The ball doesn’t carry as well, you’re not going to be as loose, and every time you hit the ball off the end of the bat you feel like your hands are broken.”
Teixeira and his teammates may have to get used to it. The forecast for the next several days does not call for much higher temperatures, and the team’s quirky early-season schedule is frontloaded with home games. Twelve of the Yankees’ first 15 games are in the Bronx, the only interruption being a weekend series in a potentially chillier clime: Boston.
Through May 1, only 8 of the team’s first 28 games are on the road, and the 20 home games equal the number the Yankees are scheduled to play in August and September combined.
Manager Joe Girardi said that so many late-season away games did not matter much — “Our club in the past has played well on the road, so that’s not a huge concern,” he said — but the early-season home games can create a problem if weather forces many cancellations.
Swisher raised an eyebrow over the schedule.
“We’re home the whole month of April, but then we have, like, nine home games in August?” Swisher said with an incredulous shrug. “Why would you do that? Why would you not start us off in warmer climates, and then once the Midwest and the East start warming up, play us there. Send us out west, send us down south, send us anywhere. But you’re going to put us here for a whole month?”
The main difficulty for pitchers in the cold is maintaining a feel for the ball, so it does not begin to feel slippery, in Swisher’s phrase, “like a cue ball.”
Phil Hughes, who will start the third game of the season on Sunday, acknowledged that the cold could be a factor in his using the pitch he worked hardest on in spring training: the changeup.
“The first week of the season the adrenaline warms you up a little,” he said, “but it is a feel pitch, and if you can’t feel the baseball as well as you can in warm weather, it might be affected. That’s what these next couple of days are for, to get used to it, and hopefully by Sunday I’ll be all right.”
Cue ball effect aside, generally the players seem to regard cold weather as a boon for pitchers as opposed to hitters.
“Definitely pitchers,” Jeter said, “because pitchers are always moving.”
Joba Chamberlain, the Yankees reliever, agreed.
“Pitchers, we dictate everything that’s going on,” he said. “You can get in on people’s hands.”
He also made the point that before a pitcher enters the game, he warms up. “Even when it’s cold you’re working up a sweat,” he said. “We get hot just to come in.” Both starting pitchers, Verlander and the Yankees’ C. C. Sabathia, responded the same way — with a smile and a four-word sentence — when asked about playing in the cold. “Hitters don’t like it,” they said.
Sabathia, the former Cleveland Indian, added: “I’m used to it, from pitching in Cleveland. I kind of like it.”
Jeter said his least favorite of the elements was wind. “Windy is the toughest,” he said. “Wind makes it colder, plus you’ve got to throw into the wind, and hit into the wind. Wind complicates things.”
Russell Martin, beginning his first season with the Yankees after playing in relatively sunny Los Angeles, said nobody had an advantage in the cold. It was bad for both the hitter and pitcher, he said.
And then there was Mariano Rivera. You’d think, perhaps, that as a native Panamanian, Rivera, the Yanks’ nonpareil closer, would disdain low temperatures and say so. But asked if he preferred pitching in warm weather, what he disdained was the question.
“What I prefer or don’t prefer, it don’t matter,” he said, speaking with characteristic quietude and gravitas. “It’s not going to change anything. We’re here. Whether it’s cold or warm, we have to live with it. We’re ready.”
