Monthly Archives: October 2006

The Tigers tied the best of five series against the Yankees on a sunny and crisp fall afternoon in New York. They followed the ideal formula to beat the Bombers: a few well-timed hits (the revenge of Marcus Thames), add some pop (Carlos Guillen), mix in some decent starting pitching and then get to your devastating bullpen. Final score: 4-3. Justin Verlander was effectively wild as the Yankees did not score early, which tends to mean they’re going to have a long day. Other than Johnny Damon’s three-run, upper-deck home run, were effectively shut down all game long. Jason Giambi hit a long ball that went foul, Bobby Abreu hit a long single that was just short of a dinger too. And Mike Mussina could not protect a 3-1. The worst of for Mussina came when he left an 0-2 mistake rigth over the plate to Curtis Granderson, who tripled home the go-ahead run in the top of the seventh.

Joel Zumaya was sick for the Tigers, striking out Jeter, Giambi and Alex Rodriguez late in the game and throwing steadily over 100 mph. Rodriguez went 0-4 and took the brunt of the fan’s abuse. He didn’t have a good game, however, his first and last strike outs, well, those were cases where you just have to credit the pitcher now, don’t you?

For a fine re-cap of the game, check out Tyler Kepner’s story today in the Times. Pete Abraham has a host of good links for a change.

Now, we’ve got ourselves a serious. You may have your doubts about Randy Johnson, who is looking to make-up for his lousy showing in Game 3 of the 2005 ALDS (and I think he will), but as a friend said to me yesterday, “It’s not so much that I’m confident in Johnson, it is that I am positive that Kenny Rogers will be awful.” Tonight gives a new twist to the title “Grumpy, Old Men.” Johnson and Rogers may have different styles, but they both seem like miserabl sobs in their own special way.

I’m headed up to Vermont for the weekend. I’ll be checking in and providing pre-and-post game articles, though there may be fewer links than usual, on the count of they’ve only got a dial-up connection where I’m going to be out in the sticks. Cliff returns on Sunday from his honeymoon. Here’s hoping he’ll have something to sink his teeth into (i.e., ALCS Preview) when he arrives.

If you’ve got free time, check out a Q&A I did with Wade Boggs earlier this week. It includes a link to one of SI’s great interviews of all-time–from the 1986 Baseball Preview issue, Boggs, and Don Mattingly sit down to talk hitting with Ted Williams.

There is a serious mix of clouds and sun in Manhattan this morning and it is decidedly cooler than it has been for the past few days. The fall has returned. Now, this feels like weather for October baseball. It will be brisk and chilly out there this afternoon. Mike Mussina and Justin Verlander square off shortly after 1 pm at the Stadium.

Let’s Go Yanks!

Game Two will be made up at 1 pm tomorrow afternoon. Shoot, I went home and hung out with my cousin Eric. Didn’t much rain up here in the northern Bronx but better safe than sorry, right? There will be a lot of distracted Yankees fans at work on Thursday. Well, we always beg for day games. Now, we’ve got one. Have a good night, peoples. I’ll catch you in the a.m.

Update 11:20 p.m. Yeah, it’s coming down pretty good here now. It would have been a slopfest like we saw last year if they had tried to get this one in. They made the right call.

Believe it or not, it’s even warmer and muggier in the Bronx tonight than it was last night. But there it is, strange things sometimes happen. Like Mark Kotsay’s inside-the-park home run this afternoon in the A’s, Twinkies game, or two Dodgers getting tagged out at the plate by fomer Dodger catcher Paul LoDuca (Yo, Paulie, you know, Paulie) in the course of about ten seconds. Kotsay hit a sinking line drive to center field. Torii Hunter charged the ball which took a late, vicious curve down and to the right–the TV analysts on ESPN said it “knuckled.” Hunter, a highlight reel centerfielder and all-around infectiously aimable dude, dove and it got past him. Kotsay didn’t get a great jump out of the box but when he saw the ball get past Hunter he started to book his ass off. After he scored easily, Kotsay popped up from his slide and thrust his fist in the air. Hilarious. As for the Dodgers, I still don’t know what they were thinking there. One of the guys, especially the trail runner, J.D. Drew, has got to try and run LoDuca over. Still, I am pumped for Carlos Delgado, and I think it’s great that CliFFFloyd hit a bomb.

In the bowels of Yankee Stadium there is a cafeteria for the writers. During the playoffs, the room is converted into the press room where the pre-and- post game interviews are conducted. Through the far end of the room is a door which leads to the downstairs press room, a large, windlowless concrete room lined with tables and chairs and lots of men (and some women) typing away on laptop comupters. The sound of all of all the fingers tapping away on keyboards sounds like the patter of gentle rain on a tin roof. It is extremely active this evening, three hours before the game. The Yankees are on the field taking bp. Reporters are writing their stories.

I go upstairs to the main press box. The first person I see after the security guard lets me in is a middle aged woman wearing a Yankee hat and a navy blue Yankee polo shirt. She is holding a clear plastic box of chocolate chip cookies. “Hey, you wanna cookie?” she says to me opening the box and holding it toward me. “Do I?” I say and grab a large, doughy cookie. I turn right and hit the head. As I’m peeing, I eat the cookie and I hear the woman out in the hallway offering everyone she sees a cookie, the same way she asked me. And they say nobody is nice a Yankee Stadium.

This would be a money game for the Yankees to win tonight. It’s a Must game for the Tigers. Mike Mussina is a big ticket pitcher; he’s expected to win these kind of games. I’ve always liked him, so you know I’m pulling for him to come up big. Justin Verlander is a very good young pitcher too. He struggled in the second half (he was awful in August), but had a couple of strong starts late in the year and you just got to love his stuff. He seems like he’s going to be a real pitcher and not just a thrower. If the Tigers can get a two or three run lead going into the seventh, they can snake out a win for sure and then we’ve got ourselves a series. Part of me thinks the Yanks are going to continue the pound-a-thon and just roll, while the other part of me thinks that A Rod will blow and Sheffield will make a crucial error, Verlander and the pen will be great and the Tigers will find a way to win. I’m a twin, what can I tell you? I see both sides of the cern.

Yo, if they are going to hit dingers off Mussina, let’s just hope nobody is on base when they do, that’s all I’m saying.

Hope everyone enjoys the game but in order to do so you are going to have to wait around for awhile it seems. They played the anthem and the crowd waited for the Yankees to take the field. But they never did and the fans didn’t know for why? Well, evidentally, there is threatening weather a-comin’ this way with the quickness, or so says the doppler radar. The rain is supposed to hit between 8:15 and 8:30 and keep up for a good hour-and-a-half. Yikes. Luckily, I brought some good reading material. Too bad I forgot my gollaches. Kind of funny to see the game called before it starts to rain. People are just scratching their heads, going, oy. Call the babysitter, we’re gunna be here awhile.

Irregardless, as they like to say in the Bronx, Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

When I left the Stadium last night it was close to midnight. Most of the exits on the ground floor were already closed so I had to walk around the park the long way, through the outfield bleachers, to reach the street. The bright stadium lights were dimmed and it was still humid. Incredibly, the place was virtually empty. I was surprised at how fast everyone was gone. The subway stations were desolate too–the night crew already had long hoses out and were washing down the platforms. When I reached the 1 train at 168 street, I was a little unnerved by just how alone I felt. Nobody was around, which is never a comfortable feeling for this New Yorker.

It wasn’t long before an Asian couple wearing matching Wang shirts joined me on the platform. I struck up a conversation with them. Yes, they were both originally from Tawain but they had met as students here in the States, at Syracuse University. Now, they are co-workers in southern California. They made the trip back east, in part, to see Wang pitch last night. I asked if they were a couple or just co-workers and they told me they are returning to Syracuse this weekend to get married. Just the two of them (they have no family in the States). How cool is that? I told them that I just got engaged and we became fast friends. We rode the train uptown together and they insisted on taking pictures with me before I got off at my stop. We hugged goodbye.

Couple of mid-day links for your face:

Emma Span on the different clubhouse cultures in the Bronx and Queens, uber-Yankee blogger, Pete Abraham with some cherce links, Larry Mahnken recaps Game 1, Tom Verducci on Derek Jeter, Jack Curry on Jim Leyland, Ken Rosenthal on the Yankee offense, and finally, an interview with yours truly for the Sports Media Guide site.

ALCS Game One: Yanks 8, Tigers 4

The auxiliary press box takes up four full sections in right field. Each row actually takes up two rows of seats, one with a long wood board laid across the top to serve as a table. A security guard named Lee Brown shows me my seat. He is a lanky middle-aged man, with a high forehead and an afro and has the features of the jock-turned-actor, Bernie Casey, only he’s thinner. So, I am sitting in the front row, second box from the right. Not three feet to my left is a 25 inch Television set, resting on an additional wood platform. Each row has its own TV, which is playing the Fox broadcast of the game. The TV feed is about three seconds delayed and it is truly surreal being so close to a set, seeing the game the way we normally do in the privacy of our own homes, our own lives, out of the corner of my eye as I look out onto the real Yankee Stadium field.

After the anthem and the pageantry, two jet planes fly over the Stadium. “This gunna be awesome,” says Lee as he moves to far right corner of the loge section. As they pass by, Lee salutes and releases with an exaggerated gesture, waving the planes goodbye. The field is cleared and then “Hell’s Bells” by AC DC starts to play. The door to the bullpen in left center field opens as six umpires climb out of the Yankee dugout and slowly amble towards the plate. As they move the song continues to play. They plod slowly but with purpose like an unintentional Quentin Tarrantino parody.

(more…)

I arrived at Yankee Stadium tonight at twenty to seven, just shy of two hours before first pitch. I heard a couple fighting on the train ride up. “That’s not what I’m sayin, you don’t listen,” the guy said. “I know what you’re sayin, you just intrepret me wrong,” she answered. I tried to engage a non-descript-looking and desultory dude to no avail. But when I climbed the stairs to the street a block away from the Stadium in the Bronx, I was greeted by an unseasonably warm evening, laced with the last bits of humidity this Indian Summer has to offer. They say it may even rain later on. The sun was setting, and you could feel that something different was in the air. Traffic was blocked off, and there were a lot of cops around. Things felt orderly.

I just missed magic hour, the sun was already well down, and there was just a little bit of natural light left. I got to the area where a cop has to check your security in order to pass. The cop, as always, is a young Latin guy, maybe late twenties, big, brown eyes, neatly trimmed mustache. I’ve seen him each time I’ve been at the Stadium this year and I greet him with a smile. He asks for my ID, checks it, and tells me to go ahead without any further recognition. Running parallel along the third baseside of the Park is a basketball court and a ratty baseball field. With no lights and precious little daylight left. But Kids were still playing hoops on the basketball court, and behind that, other kids were winding down a baseball practice. My favorite part of playing baseball as a teenager was staying late at practice taking grounders from my coach until it simply got too dark to see.

I moved towards the Yankee Press area. A group of cops are standing around. I hear one say, “With a strip on the roof? And you wouldn’t rock that Sh**?” Not too many people yet, certainly no crunch, this was also that last pause in of the long regular season before the team and the fanbase kicks off another October. First team to eleven wins. And it is definitely Broadway tonight in the Bronx. When I turned the corner to the final stretch before approaching the club box and press areas, I was almost knocked over by a wave of cologne. Guys stood in small groups, talking on their cell phones. Pretty, sun-tanned, guys with make-up, some smoking cigars.

The Yankees set up a tent outside of the press area to accomidate all the media that will be here tonight. Three women in their mid-twenties are behind the desk. “Belth. That’s B as in Bronx,” I say to the women. “Did you say B as in boring?” says one of the girls who was sitting down (the prettiest one was standing). “No, but I say A as in aardvark. Or P as in–” “P as in pig,” the girl says. “Or as in pneumonia,” I say using an old Elaine May line. I wait. No laugh. Okay, then, moving on.

I go up to the press box to see where I’m to be seated. There is an auxillary press box set up in the loge seats out in right field. I figured I would be seated there. I checked out the chart in the press box behind home plate and ran into a sportswriter I have known for a few years. He was on the phone and told me to hang on. I looked down at the field and saw the Tigers taking bp. I leaned against the top railing of the press box, and looked down and saw a fat meat sandwhich of some sort. And fat fingers picking it up. The fat fingers belonged to a fat sportswriter who typed with furious speed and grace on a small laptop keyboard. His fingers moved with the light touch that some big men like Fatty Arbuckle have dancing.

The sportswriter I was waiting on got off the phone and talked to me about something that was on his mind as he walked to towards the elevator. I was going the other way but walked with him. In the middle of thought, he was distracted by someone else and immediately walked away. I stopped walking and looked after him. When he got to the door that leads to the elevator he finally looked up and saw me. I raised my hand, “OK, catch up with you later.” And he looked haggard and quickly dipped through the door after the man he was now speaking with.

As I walked the corridors of the Lodge section I was struck by how quiet it still was. It is so cinematic walking through a stadium, every so often catching another glimpse of the field. I stopped and talked to a security guard. Finally somebody normal.

I finally got to my seat just before seven. Front row of the press box in right field. Only the railing is in front of me. Tough to get one in here but a homer is always possible. Incredibly dope seats. You guys know that I’m appreciating every moment and am truly humbled by the opportunities I’ve worked so hard to create.

Chien Ming Wang v. Nate Robertson.

Bring the muthafargin’ Rukus.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

Don’t you guys miss ol’ Cliff right about now? I know I do. I’ve grown accustom to reading his series previews just as much as you have. But our man is still on his honeymoon over in Italy (he returns on Sunday). I’m not much for predictions and previews myself, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out what heads are saying about the Yankees-Tigers match-up in the ALCS. Dig the linkathon:

Tyler Kepner, Steven Goldman, Joel Sherman, John Donovan, Dayn Perry, David Pinto, Rany Jazayerli, SG, ESPN, Mitch Albom, Mike Plugh, Sam Borden, Ben Kabak, Don Amore, Steve Lombardi, and Brian Borawski.

There, that should get you started. Yo, I’m mad excitable and it’s not even 9 a.m. Another October, another chance for the Yanks to make a run at the title. These are good times indeed. I’m trying to stay calm and enjoy every moment of it, cause I know it won’t last forever. It’s been another great season for the Yanks and another great season here at Bronx Banter with all of you guys. I look forward to watching the playoffs unfold along with you. And that’s word to Big Bird.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

Rich Lederer takes a look at the MVP race in both leagues. I like his two cherces: Prince Albert and Derek Geetah.

The Yanks lost their final game of the season 7-5 to the Jays (thank you very much, Kyle Farnsworth). They finish the year 97-65 tied for the best record in baseball with…the Mets. Go figure that. The Tigers lost today while the Twins won, meaning that Detroit will play the Bombers starting Tuesday night at the Stadium. This is a match-up that many Yankee fans wanted, especially with the Tigers limping into the post season. But careful what you wish for, right? They still have a lot of pop in their lineup and a nasty bullpen.

Derek Jeter went 1-5 and lost out on the batting title to Joe Mauer who had two hits today. Mauer .347, Jeter .343, Robbie Cano,.342. Congrats to Mauer, who becomes the first catcher to ever lead the American League in batting. A truly remarkable season for Mauer, who is one of three MVP candidates on his team (Santana and, the favorite, Justin Morneau, are the other two). What a wonderful year for out boy Jeter, the future Hall of Famer, who was a beast.

So, the match-ups are all set. Yanks vs. Tigers. A’s vs. Twins.

Let’s Go Baseball!

“I’ve pitched through pain and discomfort before,” he said. “I’m 43 years old. I’ve got an arthritic knee that I’ll probably need replaced. I’ve had one back surgery and another one, probably, that I may need. I’m not going to complain about my health. I’m here to pitch in the postseason, and I’ll do whatever I can.”
(Kepner, Times)

“I can win 17 games anywhere, but my better chances of going to the playoffs was here, with the Yankees, and that’s why I’m here,” Johnson said. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”
(McCarron, Daily News)

In spite of Johnson’s uncertain status–and I don’t think there is much doubt that he’ll be out there for Game 3, or Game 4 of the ALCS–there were smiles all around Yankee Stadium yesterday even though the Bombers fell to the Jays, 6-5. Alex Rodriguez and Gary Sheffield hit back-to-back home runs and Derek Jeter went 3-3 to raise his average to .345. Jeter is just one point behind the Twins’ Joe Mauer, who did not play yesterday. It is foggy and raining this morning the Bronx (the Big Unit is scheduled to have a bullpen session this morning which will go a long way in determining how ready he’ll be for the ALCS). This is a game that could easily be called, seeing as how it doesn’t have any significance, or bearing on the playoffs. However, if the game is played, Jeter will start, you can count on that (it would be a shame if Mauer, who sat out yesterday, doesn’t play this afternoon).

Bernie Williams will serve as the Yankee manager today. Mike Mussina won a cern flip with Mariano Rivera and will act as pitching coach, while Lee Maz will be the bench coach. After the game yesterday, Joe Torre told reporters, “Bernie says the toughest part will be staying awake for nine innings.” Torre laughed and then said softly, “He’s so beautiful.” Not ten minutes later, Jeter told a group of writers, “I don’t think Bernie’s sat on the bench [for an entire game] in eleven years, so this’ll be a first.” Jeter added that Bernie might not sit there for the whole game today, and said, “I think the bench coach will play a big part in tomorrow’s game.”

Update Here comes the sun, folks. After raining all morning, the sun is out. Sure, there are lots of clouds but looks like they will get this one in. Go DJ.