How bad were the Yankees on opening day? Well, A-Rod was the bright spot

NEW YORK – The finest moment of opening day for the New York Yankees came when their soon-to-be-40-year-old designated hitter, returning from a year-long suspension for copious steroid use, laced a single into right-center field. And because this was Game 1 of a six-month journey, and the Yankees have 161 more to rid the acrid taste of a 6-1 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays, lending any sort of significance to a singular game is folly.

But.

The Yankees have more buts than Sir Mix-A-Lot. Their rotation could be great … but keeping it healthy is a chore. Their lineup could hit … but they spend too much time searching for their dentures. They do play in a wide-open American League East … but they picked the wrong year to start the season with weaknesses.

Their Kardashian-sized but is instead a limb, simple and fragile, partially broken already, just waiting for the day the rest goes. It belongs to Masahiro Tanaka, and he was the greatest culprit Monday, yielding five runs in four innings while barely showcasing a fastball because it wasn’t worth throwing.

For Tanaka to turn the return of Alex Rodriguez, aforementioned DH, into a subplot took a great deal of mediocrity, which he obliged early and often. Tanaka is pitching with a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament and said he would change his style accordingly, and by the end of his afternoon that much was obvious. Of the 82 pitches Tanaka threw, just 26 of them were fastballs, and most of those fastballs were of the two-seam variety, which Tanaka said he wants to throw because they’re easier on his arm. When asked why he threw so few fastballs, the answer was telling – and told the sort of story the Yankees need not hear on the first day of a long season.

“Because they were being hit,” Tanaka said.

It was an honest assessment, and he didn’t blame that on the quality of the pitches so much as the counts in which they came. Ignoring the quality, of course, was akin to stepping around a giant pothole and acting like there’s no gap in the ground. Two Tanaka fastballs reached 93 mph. None hit 92. The other two dozen sat in the 89- to 91-mph range – below average for a right-handed pitcher, and exactly the sort on which hitters will sit when they know Tanaka’s devastating split-fingered fastball dives out of the strike zone more often than not.

The velocity of Tanaka’s fastball grew into an issue this week when he copped to his new style, and Yankees manager Joe Girardi tried to explain it away: “Velocity can be talked about a lot, but we’ve seen guys throw 95 get hit really hard. It comes down to location, movement and deception, which he had the first two innings. The third inning he did not because he got in bad counts, and that can be a problem.”

Here’s the thing: Bad counts should not change location, movement or deception. The situation has no bearing on the pitch. Stuff is stuff, execution is execution, quality is quality. These are independent variables, and to tie the Blue Jays hanging a five-spot in Tanaka in the third inning to bad counts is excuse-making at its finest.

Certainly the possibility exists that Tanaka learns to pitch at 90 mph and turn hitters into silly putty, as he did last year when the fastball tickled the mid-90s and made his splitter and slider look all the more difficult to hit. Pitching backward is an art that a handful of starters with mediocre fastballs learn, and unless Tanaka really is building arm strength, as Girardi alluded to, it’s one he must master in a hurry.

Because without Tanaka pitching like a frontline starter, a troublesome 2015 could lay ahead for the Yankees. Their age is an issue, as is their health, and anything they get from Rodriguez is a bonus. Not only did he look like a big league ballplayer in his first game back since September 2013, he was plenty serviceable, with a pair of balls hit toward the right-field gap – one fell – and a walk as he filled what will be his customary DH role.

The hullaballoo over Rodriguez at the beginning of spring training died down, and while he’s far from one of the guys – the chatter will pick back up as he starts hitting home runs and approaches the 660th that will trigger a $5 million bonus the Yankees don’t want to pay – he isn’t exactly the distraction he could be.

Which speaks well of Rodriguez. The whole humbling-himself narrative his handlers created for him is transparent, but he isn’t busting out any of his typical shenanigans, either, and that should be considered a rousing victory. He’s wearing his Yankees hat proud – or at least proud considering he spent last year suing them – and saying all the right things.

“I’ve played on a lot of great teams,” Rodriguez said. “This feels like a team with a lot of potential.”

Potential for what, exactly, Rodriguez didn’t expound upon. Potential for the playoffs? Only if those buts turn out on the right side for the Yankees. Potential for trouble? That’s likelier. Potential for an implosion? Well, that’s what happens should those buts go the other way.

The 2015 Yankees are a fascinating bunch, a $200 million-plus team on which nearly every player of consequence is overpaid. Tanaka isn’t on that list, not yet, even if every throw he makes imperils his value. The elbow is a finicky thing, and Tanaka trying to wrangle it on the fly reeks of desperation – or, perhaps, acknowledgement of the inevitable.

“I don’t look at today’s results as all bad at all,” Tanaka said. “If I’m able to make a little bit of adjustments, I should be able to get back into the form that I want to.”

The confidence is nice and necessary. Game 1 didn’t exactly go how the Yankees planned, with the young Drew Hutchison shutting them down until a Brett Gardner home run changed the zero in their run column to a one. Aside from that, it was pop-ups and groundballs and weak contact. And going the other way, it was Toronto making Tanaka’s take-it-easy plan look just easy.

“It’s a long season for these guys,” Girardi said, and he’s right. Tanaka could have 33 more of these, and his teammates 161 more, to erase all of the fear about the 2015 season. No more boneheaded plays like Derek Jeter’s replacement, Didi Gregorious, trying to steal third base against the rocket-armed Russell Martin with two outs in the eighth inning, down five runs, a left-handed power hitter at the plate and a 20-year-old rookie throwing the first pitch of his major league career.

That’s the sort of opening day it was for the Yankees. But ugly.