Andy Pettitte Returns to Yankees: Rapid Reaction

This afternoon I came back from a lovely lunch with a tasty ice cream cone (Bailey’s flavored, to get into the St. Paddy’s Day spirit) and headed over to MLB.com, as I do every afternoon. I was all set to gear up an audio feed for this afternoon’s Spring Training game when I glanced over to the headlines on the far right of the page. To my surprise I spotted the following headline at the very top:

"Pettitte Comes Out of Retirement, Joins Yanks"

Well, I thought, that is a very misleading headline. Someone over at MLB Advanced Media should be reprimanded for getting people’s hopes up.

I was curious, nonetheless, about what role Andy would be playing with the team. Would he be a commentator like David Wells, David Cone, Paul O’Neill, etc.? Or would he be in some sort of coaching role? I clicked through the link to find out and read (and reread) the following:

"Andy Pettitte is coming back to the Yankees. The 240-game winner signed a Minor League contract on Friday and will slip his old No. 46 back on in an attempt to restart his career."

Am I being punked by MLB right now? That is not cool. We Yankees fans already get plenty of hate from fans of other teams, why would MLB make something like this up? Somebody over there should be fired!

My next move: head to Twitter in an attempt to verify this rumor. Of course, there are always two possibilities when it comes to Twitter. The first is that one (or most likely dozens) of the Yankees fans I follow will verify this as a fact by retweeting info about it. The second is that one (or most likely dozens) of the Yankees fans I follow will continue to spread a baseless rumor by retweeting info about it. Such is the nature of Twitter. In this particular case, Twitter was in fact abuzz with news of Andy Pettitte. Well, not so much news as general exclamations of “holy crap!”

Holy crap indeed! Andy Pettitte is back! Weeeeeeeeeee!

I contributed my own reaction to the Twitter buzz (WHAT THE WHAT?!), told all my coworkers (hey guys, did you hear the news?), and texted my mom, because that’s what people do in important situations like this. Her response: FANTASTIC!

So there it is. What a great surprise while eating ice cream on a sunny Friday afternoon. Beloved Yankees should come out of retirement more often. Perhaps Yogi is getting a little bored living a life of leisure…