It was 20 years ago today that we watched the New York Yankees opener against the Kansas City Royals. Here's the box score via Baseball Reference. We recall Luis Sojo going back on a shallow fly and the ball bouncing off his glove*. The official scorer ruled it an error, but announcer Joe Morgan, who was at his absolute best in that period, argued that the play was extremely difficult and changed the scorer's mind.
The Yankees were coming off their third straight World Series victory and fourth in five years. These were Joe Torre's Yankees. Kind of dull in the regular season but unstoppable in the season. They played baseball the right way. The batters worked the count, made productive outs, put the ball in play. The pitchers weren't concerned with velocity but location and movement. They made first pitch strikes. Generally the Yankees would look pretty unspectacular winning two out of three games. Then sometime in the summer they'd real off eight in a row and 14 out of 15. Late in the year they'd have a four game series against rival Boston and take care of business. After 1999, when Pedro Martinez was absolutely invincible, he really didn't bother the Yankees.
It felt good to have baseball back. We were out of work for nine months now and it was nice to have something to watch in the afternoons. MLB did this novel thing where for $9.99 a year you could listen to any game you wanted online.
By then we had actually stopped looking for work. Instead we were going back to school. Three year's before we had dropped out of a non-Jesuit university in DC. It was the right decision. After years of futility we decided we needed a degree. Or had we? Mostly, after months and months of unemployment, we just wanted something today.
We don't remember how we found it, but there was something called American Military University, online. We would take classes online, via a dialup modem because it was 2001. AMU accepted all our credits, and we needed 13 more classes to earn a BA in military history. And away we went. We thought it'd be easy, but studying this way was quite a grind, actually. We took intro to military history, military history from ancient times till 1492, military history from 1492 till today, and strategy. In follow up semesters we'd take period and nation specific classes.** That semester we wrote a paper on Scipio Africanus, which would eventually become a magazine article. From nearly the beginning we wrote papers with that in mind and it was or Medieval Warfare professor, Brian Todd Carey who first suggested we do so.
Just a few months later, we'd move to New Jersey. But that's the subject for another post.
Below, your Friday flag***:
**Germans!
***If we weren't so lazy we'd dig out the 26 time WS Champ Yankees flag we bought in 2001. Oh well. This one is relevant.
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