Buhner.com

I watched a decent amount of the Yankees/Red Sox opener on YES last night, and I caught the real open­ing day this after­noon, catch­ing a bit of Brewers/Pirates, Royals/Tigers, Indians/White Sox, then later Mariners/Twins and Cubs/D-Backs. It’s great, because Open­ing Day gen­er­ally has sell­outs, so I don’t have to worry about local black­out on the 87 or so local Fox Sports chan­nels I get on the dish. I don’t expect the same in the future, and I can’t really afford (or jus­tify) buy­ing the MLB pack­age. Some obser­va­tions from today:

- See­ing David Wells get booed doesn’t exactly hurt my feel­ings. Aside from my per­sonal feel­ings about the guy, I think ESPN and YES built up the Wells/Yankees thing a bit too much. I mean, I under­stand the guy grew up a Yan­kee fan, but we’re not talk­ing about a guy who spent 15 years with the fran­chise then goes to the “enemy”. Wells spent four years with the Yan­kees in his career — enter­ing it’s 19th year. It’d be one thing if Wells was say­ing the things he said if he were a life-long Yan­kee. But with Wells’ his­tory, it’s not that big of a deal.

- Two play­ers I looked at in my GDR draft were Dmitri Young and Richie Sex­son, both of whom we missed out on. Nate (who I have the GDR team with) wanted Sex­son, I wanted Young. Young went off and did the Tuffy Rhodes, hit­ting three home runs, while Sex­son hit two, one a mam­moth shot I saw to deep cen­ter. While I think they both under­rated, Sex­son should put up great Buhner-like num­bers in Seat­tle, per­haps a lit­tle bet­ter. Young’s not going to put up the num­bers Sex­son will/should, but he hits for aver­age, power (as evi­dent today), can play mul­ti­ple posi­tions, and will take a walk here and there. I still picked him up in my Yahoo league, although I don’t need him right now.

- Javier Vazquez tried to prove the Yan­kees right by get­ting ham­mered against the Cubs. By the time I picked up the game, Vazquez was gone and the Cubs already had 7 runs. That was in the sec­ond inning. Vazquez was one of those peo­ple that pop­u­lar the­ory said was going to bounce back and have a great sea­son, but at this rate, the Yan­kees may have been on to some­thing. I was one of the peo­ple who wanted to give Vazquez a chance this sea­son, but the way he dropped off last sea­son looked less like “New York pres­sure” and more like “tired arm”. Vazquez came to the Yan­kees as a 27 year old who had 1226 innings already on his arm, includ­ing four straight 200+ inning sea­sons. Vazquez might still have a fine career, but Vazquez is no Jeff Weaver.