Bronx, N.Y., May 22, 2009 — It didn’t take the Phillies long to come up with a first impression of the new Yankee Stadium. A.J. Burnett’s first-pitch fastball to Jimmy Rollins at 7:09 landed several rows back in the right field stands before the clock advanced to 7:10. True, the next pitch that hit Chase Utley didn’t seem nearly as neighborly, but once Phillie righty Brett Myers threw his second pitch behind Derek Jeter 10 or so minutes later and both benches were warned, the new place became downright civil yet again.

With the Phils up 1-0 on the Rollins jack, the Yanks threatened in the first after a Derek Jeter single and Johnny Damon fielder’s choice. One out later Alex Rodriguez doubled into the left field corner but the Raul Ibanez to Rollins to Carlos Ruiz relay nailed Damon at the plate by plenty, and the night went downhill for the home team from there. Burnett had been impressive after the first-inning homer and hit by pitch, following an Ibanez single by striking out Ryan Howard and Jason Werth swinging on eight pitches before Mark Teixeira made the first of several great plays to rob Shane Victorino of a potential rbi single.

But things headed south in the second. Overpowered Matt Stairs topped an 0-2 pitch to the right of the mound as A.J. fell off to the other side, and the Philly DH reached on the weakest of singles. Pedro Feliz flied out to right, but catcher Ruiz turned on a 1-2 offering and lifted it one row beyond the fence in left over a leaping Damon for a 3-0 Phillies lead. With Myers retiring 14 of the next 17 Yankee batters, this one was over, though few realized it so early. Teixeira singled to left with one down in the fourth and Hideki Matsui moved him 90 feet with an infield roller the same way one out later, but Nick Swisher bounced to second. As a matter of fact, Swisher, Robbie Cano, Melky Cabrera, and Kevin Cash went 1-for-15 at the bottom of the order, and the Yanks could do no more than throw up a few late singleton home runs of their own.

Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter homered into the visiting, then home, bullpens in the sixth and eighth innings respectively, but the Yanks never really threatened. Burnett was victimized by a two-run Jayson Werth bomb in the fifth before retiring after six, and Chien-Ming Wang, who went the last three after coming off the DL, gave up two runs of his own. One was an Ibanez shot to the bleachers beyond the Yankee bullpen in the seventh, a home run anywhere that would have been the longest blow of the night, except that Teixeira reached a luxury box just below the Upper Deck in right in the eighth to close the scoring at 7-3. No one has reached the Upper Deck with a home run in the new digs yet (in fact, very few foul balls have found their way there), but Tex got real close.

Since these teams opened their interleague play with a Philly three-game sweep in 1997 in their old Stadium, a cheerless bunker I can’t believe anyone in either city misses, the Phillies have not done well in the Bronx, where they have lost five of six, but they seem to like the new place. Citizen’s Bank Field in Philly, the home of the current World Champs, is considered something of a bandbox around the league, so it’s little surprise that they took so well to the new Stadium, which is producing home runs in legendary numbers. And the Yanks and their fans have little to crow about, coming off a nine-game win streak, seven of them at home. In addition, the Mets and the Braves beat the Red Sox and the Blue Jays, the two teams the Yanks are chasing, so it is easy to be gracious about losing one home game to Philly.

We’ll have to be gracious about Myers too, who was surprisingly brilliant until the late home runs. Yankee bats rarely squared up on his low nineties heat, and he threw both a mid-eighties change and slow curve for strikes every time the Yanks tried to work the count. Not only did he not walk anyone to go with his five strike outs, he didn’t issue three balls to any Yankee batter.

On the Yankee side of things, Burnett pitched better than the numbers, but he was down 3-0 so suddenly without really having given up much. The news on Wang was mixed. He did get four ground ball outs with his sinker, but he threw just five of 15 first-pitch strikes, and fell behind in the count too often; Ibanez’s bomb was on a 3-1 pitch. Four of the five other hits he surrendered were ground balls, so if he can throw strikes, he’s far better than the punching bag he was early in the season in his first three starts.

Legendary American poet Robert Frost, who passed away in 1963, had a New Hampshire farm that was dedicated in a ceremony on May 22, 1977, 14 years after his death, and 32 years ago this day. It is from his poem Mended Fences that we paraphrased [and altered] the title of this column: “Good (not ‘close’) fences make good neighbors.”

We can be glad that the Phillies and their fans so enjoyed their first game in the new Yankee Stadium.

Let’s hope, however, that it is not so “neighborly” a place in the future.

YANKEE BASEBALL!!!