The Sports Monitor

It had been more than two years since I had been to a baseball game. That ended Tuesday night. Gerrit Cole warming up. Pic courtesy of my lousy phone camera. And what a night to catch a game; it was a playoff-like atmosphere at PNC Park. Gerrit Cole had a smashing debut, striking out his first batter faced on three pitches. In his first at-bat, he drove in two runs. Starling Marte hit a homer, Pedro Alvarez hit one, too, and the Pirates beat the World Champion Giants 8-2. What more could you want? Burger featuring egg and bacon on a doughnut. Well, I guess the timing for the metal-detector wands, but the Pirates admitted their mistake on that one. That wouldn't have been much of a problem if there weren't 30,000 fans there. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to see Cole's first start. He hit the upper-90s, including 98 in the seventh inning. He only struck out two, but he had tremendous control -- he didn't walk a batter and had a three-ball count o...

It's always satisfying to see the New York Yankees lose a baseball game. It got better when they opened the $1.5 billion Yankee Stadium on Thursday and lost to the Indians. The best part, however, was the 22-4 bludgeoning of the Yankees by the Cleveland Indians on Saturday. The highlight was a 14-run second inning that lasted 37 minutes. The Tribe sent 17 batters to the plate that inning. How has it been going for the Yankees so far? Check out this comment from the New York Daily News after that thrashing: "We thought Obama banned torture in the United States, but it doesn't count for Yankees fans," said Larry Fannin, 51 of Yorktown Heights, N.Y., who paid $100 for his ticket. "The people around us were screaming we want a refund." Fannin was lucky. The top ticket at the new Yankee Stadium costs $2,625. I wonder what that person was saying after the game? The park is a celebration of greed and excess. The only thought put into the stadium was to extract mor...