April 8, 2014, Bronx, N.Y. — It’s a good thing the Yanks picked their second home game, and not their opener, to play a really bad game, as they dropped a 14-5 stinker to Buck Showalter’s Orioles Tuesday afternoon. It was also lucky that the weather, merely neither cold nor unpleasant early, provided the crowd of 35,000 the kind of [somewhat] sunny baseball day we’ve been missing for more than six months.

Third starter Ivan Nova had nothing, ineffective breaking pitches that too meekly caught or missed the zone, and flat not-good-enough-on-their-own fastballs. Two singles, a sac fly, and Adam Jones’s bomb to dead center put the visitors up 3-0 on Ivan’s ninth pitch. The futility of the benders seemed to fluster the young righty, and relying on suspect heat, he started the O’s off by throwing an amazing 19 of 22 pitches for strikes, resulting in six hits and a fourth run.

The Yankee defense did Nova no favors. Derek Jeter missed on a dive for a potential Delmon Young dp ball before the Jones homer, and did the same on a Steve Lombardozzi hard hopper in the hole in the fourth. Although he continued to hit, Yangervis Solarte made a futile flailing attempt on a hot shot down third, and Francisco Cervelli looked awkward in his professional debut at first. Nova failed to cover first once himself, and Chris Davis drove in the O’s seventh run by beating Joe Girardi’s odd shift with a simple slow roller toward the second base position.

With Nova gone after 11 outs, most of the remainder fell on southpaw Vidal Nuno, who got 10 of his own. They each allowed seven runs. Newly recalled Cesar Cabral did not impress early, but Dellin Betances finished strong in front of a largely empty stadium. In another bright side, Solarte and Jacoby Ellsbury continued to hit, and two certain power sources got off the schneide, as Alfonso Soriano and Kelly Johnson homered.

Musing about the day before the game, I saw that it was April 8 in 2003 when Hideki Matsui hit a grand slam in his first Yankee Stadium game. Buoyed by that memory I came across this: Playing with the Orioles, Brian Roberts was the star in a 12-5 Baltimore destruction of the Yanks in the stadium on this day in 2005, with a home run, triple, four runs scored, and four rbi’s. Roberts, off to a slow start, did have a hit and run scored this day, but my expectation that he’d be a factor in a crushing Yankee win could not have been more wrong.

Every Orioles batter scored, and eight of nine drove in runs. Highlighting the 20-hit, 14-run onslaught, the first five in their order scored nine runs, and drove in 11. By the time two young fans ran on the field and circled shortstop during a Cervelli at bat in the eighth, some cheered, and some were too numbed to care.

The Orioles put an April 8 ache on the Yanks again, and threw in two additional scores for good measure.

YANKEE BASEBALL!!!