There's no point in trying to make sense of it. The Orioles turned conventional wisdom on its head to trounce the New York Yankees on Opening Day at Camden Yards. They beat the most expensive pitcher on the most expensive team in baseball and left us with nothing but John Lennon ringing in our skulls.
Instant karma's gonna get you.
How else do you explain Mark Teixeira's punchless Yankees debut or the strange eighth-inning home run by shortstop Cesar Izturis that had a spooky resemblance to the infamous Jeffrey Maier incident at Yankee Stadium all those years ago?
Maybe that's a stretch, but the Orioles' 10-5 victory had a strange quality that you don't find in a lot of baseball games, especially baseball games between teams on the opposite ends of the competitive spectrum. There was something for everyone - some aspect of the experience that rang true no matter what mind-set you brought to the ballpark with you.
Obviously, if you were disgusted with Teixeira's decision to choose the Yankees instead of his hometown Orioles last winter, he obliged you with an 0-for-4 performance that was satisfying on both an emotional and strategic level. There were a couple of situations in which he could have made Oriole Park his stage on his first real day in pinstripes, but he did nothing to quiet the angry fans who booed him lustily at every turn.
If you are generally upset with baseball's uneven economics, there had to be some satisfaction in watching $341 million worth of free-agent talent - Sabathia and Teixeira - run aground on Day One. No doubt, Sabathia will rise up and compete for the Cy Young Award and Teixeira will deliver his usual 35 home runs and 120 RBIs, but on this particular day in this particular place, they were just a couple of plug nickels. Those who are so inclined could either look at that as an argument for or against some kind of enforced payroll equality.
If you're an Orioles optimist, Jeremy Guthrie's performance proved spring-training statistics don't mean that much and - by extension - neither does all that past-performance information that makes the Orioles' rotation so frightening. Guthrie couldn't get anybody out during the exhibition season or the World Baseball Classic, but he and pitching coach Rick Kranitz insisted all along spring-training stats were meaningless. Now, there's a little more room to hope that applies to Adam Eaton and George Sherrill, though not to spring standouts Koji Uehara and Alfredo Simon.
