Giancarlo Stanton homers, Yankees beat Nationals in rain-shortened MLB opener

What I’m Hearing: October baseball just went into overdrive . Bob Nightengale explains how the 16-team postseason will work for MLB. USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – A World Series banner was raised Thursday night, with nobody around to cheer its ascent.

A nationally revered doctor threw out the first pitch, but there was no curtain call to take, nor any reason to be red-faced after he pulled it comically away from his catcher.

A virtually empty Nationals Park, playing host to the first regular season game among the four major North American sports leagues since a pandemic shut them all down in March and shut many of us in, could not contain the voices of Washington Nationals and New York Yankees players, whose chatter echoed through the park.

Nor could it contain the baseball struck by Giancarlo Stanton, who greeted Max Scherzer and this evolving concept of pandemic baseball with a vicious swing of his bat, sending the sphere hurtling into vacated seats outside something called the “Budweiser Brew House,” where there were no imbibing fans to greet its arrival.

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Stanton’s jolt, and the expected brilliance of new Yankees ace Gerrit Cole, fed a baseball-starved national TV audience some long-awaited red meat, and kick-started a 4-1 Yankees victory in a 2020 season opener deferred four months by the novel coronavirus.

In keeping with these challenging times, though, the game was not played to completion. A menacing thunderstorm circled the area and finally touched down on South Capitol Street shortly before 9 p.m. ET, and the game was not resumed after a delay was called with one out in the top of the sixth inning.

It was so very 2020. But it was probably just as well.

Scherzer was more or less done, mixing stretches of brilliance – he struck out 11 Yankees – with the occasional hiccup against a Yankee offense that signaled it may be as punishing on the field as it is on paper.

Especially when both Aaron Judge and Stanton are healthy.

The corner outfielders both battled maladies this spring and summer but appear good to go. Judge singled off Scherzer in the first and then Stanton unloaded on a 94-mph Scherzer cutter, the crack of the bat and the clang of its arrival echoing throughout the nearly deserted ballpark.

Stanton also drove in their final run with a fifth-inning single, not that Cole needed the extra cushion.

Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton celebrate the latter’s two-run homer in the first inning.

 (Photo: Geoff Burke, USA TODAY Sports)

He was untouchable after yielding a first-inning home run to Adam Eaton, giving up no more hits to an emaciated Nationals lineup that lost Anthony Rendon to free agency and 21-year-old budding star Juan Soto to a positive test for the coronavirus.

That jolting news Thursday afternoon cast an immediate pall over the opener, a grim reminder of the risks the players will assume to get this season in, although Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo reported that Soto is asymptomatic.

Without their 21-year-old who drove in 110 runs and hit five postseason home runs, the Nationals inserted Andrew Stevenson in left field and the eighth spot in the lineup. He was badly overmatched by Cole, who struck out the career .241 hitter on five pitches in the second and four pitches in the fifth.

Cole may find tougher lineups throughout the all-East 60-game schedule the Yankees must navigate, but his precision Thursday was nonetheless compelling. He fired 10 pitches at least 96 mph, dotting the outside corner with ease.

He pitched from the same mound in his last start that mattered, Game 5 of the World Series against these Nationals. Cole dominated them that night, too, striking out nine over seven innings of a 7-1 win.

But he was a Houston Astro then, and the Nationals came back to win the final two games of that Series in Houston. Cole didn’t get into Game 7 in relief and six weeks later was a Yankee, setting a record for richest contract for a pitcher.

The wait for his debut in pinstripes was much longer: A four-month delay due to the coronavirus.

It ended after he threw just 75 pitches, weather, not the pandemic, to blame.

That’s OK. Cole’s contract runs for nine years, with hopes for games of much greater consequence than Thursday’s.

Some of them with fans in attendance, even.

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