Yesterday’s win over the Pirates brings the Red Sox’s record in their Opening Day games to a perfectly even 58-58-1 (since 1901). And yes, you read that correctly, the Red Sox have a tie on Opening Day. In 1910, when baseball was not really the same as the baseball we watch and love today, ties were a thing that happened. The Red Sox went on to earn four more ties that season. Odd stuff. Opening the 2017 season in Fenway Park was great; nice for the fellas to be home to start the year. This has not typically been the case. The Red Sox have been on the road for 76 of their 117 Opening Day games – essentially two out of every three years – and it has been tough sledding: they are 34-41-1 when game one is played on the road. Starting at home, as they did yesterday, has been a much nicer way to begin the season, and indeed it was yesterday.

Those are the easy wins, which are certainly enjoyable for Red Sox fans. But there are also the back-and-forth, high-tension games that finish the Red Sox’s way, which are enjoyable in a different way and great wins for the team.

Yesterday’s win was great, but what was the best Red Sox Opening Day win? Well, it depends on how you want to measure it. By run differential, the Red Sox have had two ten-run wins on Opening Day. The first, in 1919, was a 10-0 shutout of the Yankees, then the second came in 1973, when the Sox again put it on those rival Yanks, winning 15-5. Those are the easy wins, which are certainly enjoyable for Red Sox fans. But there are also the back-and-forth, tight, high-tension games that finish the Red Sox’s way, which are enjoyable in a different way and great wins for the team. To find these sorts of games the average leverage index (aLi) can be used. By this measure, the 1969 win over the Orioles, the 1941 and 1930 wins over the Washington Senators, and the 2008 win over the Athletics (in Tokyo! More on this game below) involved the most tension. Because they were taut affairs, but ended in a Red Sox win (read: relief) they can be considered among the best wins. As a point of reference, yesterday’s win ranks as the 16^th most tense Red Sox Opening Day win by aLi.

But as their overall Opening Day record shows, there have been just as many losses as wins over the years, and the losses can make all that nice stuff I said about Opening Day seem not so nice. For example, the Red Sox took a 10-1 drubbing in 1960 at the hands of the Senators. There have also been some ugly game-ones recently: a 9-2 loss to the Yanks in 2005, which was thankfully on the road and didn’t muck up the 2004 World Series ring ceremony. Ring Day ended with a glorious 8-1 win over those same Yankees. Another recent rough start to the season was the 7-1 loss to the Royals in 2007, which Red Sox fans can just file away as a prime example that seasons with Opening Day beatings can still end on a very positive note. As for the really tense games that didn’t end the way the Red Sox would prefer, the top three (by aLi) involved the Baltimore Orioles: 2014, 1966 and 1989.

What about the individual heroes and goats of Opening Day? I said I would come back to that (ridiculous) journey at the start of the 2008 season to play a series in Tokyo. The reason that game requires another mention is that, by Win Probability Added (WPA), it had two of the top three Opening Day performances by a Red Sox batter (since 1913). Manny Ramirez, who went 2-for-5 with two doubles and four RBI that day, took top spot, and two spots below Manny is Brandon Moss, who went 2-for-5 with a home run and two RBI in that game. Manny and Moss really carried the offense that day. Maybe that ‘08 trip helped facilitate Manny’s return to baseball in Japan. Interestingly the second and fourth best performances also came in one game, as Kevin Youkilis and Dustin Pedroia stood out in the 9-7 win over the Yankees in 2010.

On the pitching side of things, WPA is not really the best measure to use for this sort of exploration, as GameScore does a better job. By GameScore, Lefty Grove’s 87 in 1940’s 1-0 win over the Senators was the best Opening Day performance by a Red Sox pitcher. Pedro Martinez’s domination of the Mariners in 2000 (82 GSc) is not too far down the list in fourth, with Dennis Eckersley’s 1981 start (81 GSc) right behind it. Eck getting a job with Oakland really hurts the NESN broadcast. Thank goodness for park sounds.

While Pedro had three of the 15 best Opening Day starts, he also had the worst. In 2002 he got lit up by the Blue Jays for eight runs on nine hits in just three innings pitched (13 GSc). Another Red Sox pitching legend shows up on the wrong end of an opening day outing, as Roger Clemens had a rough 4.2 innings against the Tigers in 1994, allowing – just like Pedro’s rough day – eight runs on nine hits. Even the greatest ones have bad days, folks. As for the batters who had ugly opening days, first baseman Tony Horton was really costly in that high-leverage loss to the Orioles in 1966 I mentioned previously. Horton cost the team almost half-a-win with his 0-for-6 that included two ground ball double-plays. More recently, by going 0-for-4 with three strikeouts in an opening day loss to the Rangers in 2011, Carl Crawford offered the earliest possible sign that his tenure in Boston was not going to go well. I was so excited for the Carl Crawford signing. It still hurts me how poorly it went.

Alas, there has been good and there has been bad on Opening Day. Yesterday, certainly goes down on the good side of the ledger, as the Red Sox won, Andrew Benintendi looked like a star, and reigning Cy Young winner Rick Porcello was sharp. Hopefully it is a sign of the season to come. But really, it is just the first step in the journey and ultimately, despite all the hoopla that comes with Opening Day, the game counts the same in the standings as each of the games that come after it. Nevertheless, due to the excitement of opening day, the start of a new season, and having baseball back in our lives, those first games can end up standing out in memory. Yesterday was another Opening Day in the books. It really is so great to have baseball back.

Photo by Greg M. Cooper – USA TODAY Sports

Top play (WPA): One plate appearance after failing to successfully bunt on a 3-1 count, inflaming the potentially overcaffeinated parts of Red Sox Twitter, Jackie Bradley Jr. poked a strange soft liner down the left-field line that Mark Trumbo was unable to reach in time — Trumbo being unable to track down fly balls being a theme of the game — and the ball plunked the ground and bounded over a relatively high part of the left field fence for a ground-rule double. The ‘oopsie’ hit sent Brock Holt across the plate and Blake Swihart to third base, from where he would score on a Betts fielder’s choice (a play on which JBJ would be thrown out at third, earning him a rebuke from a visibly exasperated Torey Lovullo in the dugout, but let’s focus on the good parts — the bad parts are coming in the next sentence.)

Bottom play (WPA): Unsurprisingly, Chris Davis’ three-run homer off of Craig Kimbrel in a tied top of the ninth swayed the game pretty decisively in the Orioles’ favor. Davis murdered the ball, sending it out of center field with an exit velocity of 111 miles per hour, which is pretty good.

Chris Davis just crushed that ball, projected distance 426. Exit velocity of 111 MPH. Only 2 of his HRs were hit that hard last year.

— Daren Willman (@darenw) April 11, 2016

Key moment: With no outs, two men aboard and the team down two in the bottom of the ninth, David Ortiz grounded into a double play that was close enough at first for John Farrell to challenge the ruling, but it was upheld. In this writer’s opinion, it would have been better if Ortiz hit a walk-off home run in his final home opening day, but it was not to be. Maybe next year.

Trend to watch: Hanley Ramirez might be a good first baseman? A week into the grand experiment, he’s been scooping balls that are by no means gimmes and snapping throws like he’s been living at the cool corner his whole career. It would be an understatement to call it a resounding success so far, and at this point he has acquitted himself more or less perfectly, save for a couple of slow rotations on cutoff throws. It’ll play.

Eye on Papi: Big Papi’s daughter sang the national anthem, and he clearly didn’t know it was going to happen. It was as sweet as Ortiz is awesome, so it was pretty damn sweet.

Coming next: Red Sox No. 2 starter and chaos incarnate Clay Buchholz faces Orioles righty Mike Wright, of whom I had never heard before researching this sentence but according to the internet is 6’6”, which is pretty tall. For the almost painfully decrepit Baltimore rotation, I suppose they’ll take their jollies where they can get them. Outside of, you know, winning every game.

Photo by David Butler II/USA Today Sports Images

It was an inauspicious start for NESN, on MLB TV at least. Cole Hamels was set to enter his first windup of the year and the screen went black. Somehow it flicked back to life before the windup was finished, he threw it, and the season was off. Mookie Betts popped out to shortstop. Dustin Pedroia came to the plate.

By now you know what happened. Pedroia hit a home run to deep left — “HOME [BLEEPING] RUN” in my game notes — and the 2015 season had begun. Like virtually everyone else in the lineup, Pedroia had missed last year’s game 162 with an injury. In the long offseason, and the absence of real baseball, there was a question of whether his power would ever return. Small sample size? Maybe. But he hit a second home run before the game was over, one to make it 3-0.

It was 3-0 because Betts had homered in between. As unlikely as it was, with a full half-season under his belt, Betts, at the ripe old age of 22, was one of only two Red Sox who played in last season’s final game and this season’s first game. He was the youngest player in the lineup but already a link to the past, and the only one on offense to play in last year’s closeout game.

The other was Clay Buchholz, but it was a different Clay then than it was yesterday.

Last year’s Buchholz gave up four runs in six innings in September garbage time, all to a zombie Yankees team that included an octogenarian at shortstop. This year’s Buchholz pitched one of the most impressive games of his Rorschach career. It was extremely impressive, even given the opponent — this year’s Phillies are an Aristocrats joke that’s only getting started — but it wasn’t just against the filler of a soft lineup that Clay shined. It was against everyone. He made Chase Utley look like a fool, twice on swinging strikeouts, and Utley is no fool.

This was Best Clay. There are many, many Clays, and each Clay has his own repertoire of pitches on a given day, 20-80 scale rankings for those pitches, and, on the best day, a repeatable windup worthy of being Yu Darvish gif-ed. This was pretty much that. When he hit his spots, he nailed the corners. When he missed, he didn’t miss. The fastball was down and the curveballs and changeups were lethal. In the infinite universe of Clays Buchholz, this a was 99th percentile outcome.

The problem is that life is a capricious toad and you never know what’s going to happen next or which mold of Clay you’re getting from start to start. This is the Clay for whom we’re perpetually waiting. We just don’t usually have to wait a whole offseason.

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Mookie Betts is the exact freaking opposite. Mookie is a single serving of life in a bottle that you can pop like Pez and you’ll never get a stomachache, because sometimes life is just magic like that, and Mookie is magic. Betts already seems like a player to whom the sport seems like a perfect extension of himself in both physical talent and familiarity. Kill me if I say it isn’t a tad Jeter-ish. Kill me if I say that there aren’t an infinite number of Mookies Betts, but just the one, and thank god he’s not in the Bronx.

His home run came on an inside fastball that he obliterated when Hamels missed his spot. It was one of five on the day; Pedroia had two and Hanley Ramirez also had two. But it was Betts’ next at-bat where his growth potential showed. At 2-0, 3-1 and 3-2, Mookie swung through fastballs that never came, and Hamels dispatched him like a veteran pitcher ought to: with offspeed pitches in fastball situations, using the kid’s piss, vinegar and intelligence against him. Make your Hamels jokes today with relish, but the guy can pitch, and this was an example of it. Mookie should have gotten on base, but he didn’t. Hamels was losing the war, but he won the battle, and Mookie was humbled.

It merely took one of the game’s best pitchers, rallying to offer up his best stuff. For a short window, Hamels was the Best Clay Buchholz, and Mookie went down. If that’s what it takes to beat this team, so be it. The Phillies couldn’t do it yesterday, and the survivors of Game 162, Mookie and Clay, Clay and Mookie, are ready to show the rest of baseball that they can’t do it either.

Photo by Kelly O’Connor, sittingstill.smugmug.com