Monthly Archives: June 2009

CC on the hill, the big fella, the stopper…

Yanks play tonight, Yanks win tonight.

Say word. ‘Nuff said.

Okay, here’s a tough scene but a vivid and compelling one. It involves baseball, and more specifically, the Yankees.

From The French Connection Part II (which is as grimey as they come). Our hero Popeye Doyle, the Ugly American himself, goes to Marseilles. Bad Guys catch him, tie him down and get him addicted to dope. Eventually, they leave him in the guter. With the help of a French detective he dries out.

This is Hackman at his best:

The best way to deal with the Yankees getting knocked around by the Red Sox?

Eat well.

My friend Alex was a baseball blogger for a minute–that’s how we met. He’s long since retired but we’ve remained friends. We’re food nerds.  Alex pent a year in Thailand when he got out of college and knows more about Asian cuisine than anyone I’ve ever met. He’s curious and driven and is open about sharing his knowledge.

We’ve cooked together for years now–at his place or up at my crib in the Bronx. We work well together in the kitchen. Fluid. When it’s his place, I’m the sous chef and he puts me to work, and vice versa when we’re at my spot.

Last night, I stopped by Alex’s new apartment in downtown Manhattan. He belongs to a farmer’s collective and picks up fruits and vegetables once-a-week. Last night we had young broccoli rabe–still bitter but tender and almost delicate–arugula, mixed lettuces, radishes and spring garlic, to work with.

I was put in charge of the salad. I don’t much care for radishes but want to like them so I keep trying to prepare them in different ways. These were long like fingerling potatoes. I sliced three, thinly, added 1/4 of a large red onion (also sliced thin), sprinkled some salt and a little bit of sugar on them, added a teaspoon of cider vinegar, and let it pickle for twenty minutes.

I threw in a handful of the arugula, a bunch of mixed greens, and drained the radishes. Then I dressed the salad with a couple of teaspoons of olive oil, a teaspoon of red wine vinegar and a pinch of salt. 

Meanwhile, Alex prepared the main course, which was served over white rice. The recipe is listed below. Here are the flicks.

Hazy grizzle.

Garlic and onions.

The beef, onions and rabe.

Cooked down.

 Plate it Up.

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Today’s news is powered by … a flight attendant with a beat!

• Sutcliffe leaves a big tip:

Hours before they were to do battle with the Red Sox Tuesday night, Mark Teixeira and Alex Rodriguez were involved in different type of confrontation, this one inside the Yankees’ clubhouse.

Upset with an accusation made by ESPN’s Rick Sutcliffe two weeks ago, the two players approached the former Cy Young winner to discuss the situation.

Sutcliffe said on the air that A-Rod had been feeding Teixeira verbal signs from the on-deck circle, giving his teammate a heads-up on the catcher’s location before the pitch was delivered. Teixeira and A-Rod pulled Sutcliffe aside when they saw him in the clubhouse last night, expressing their displeasure with his charges.

“Me, Alex and him talked about it,” Teixeira told the Daily News, confirming that the conversation took place. “No doubt it’s disappointing when someone makes an accusation like that. Whatever. I can’t control what they say.”

[My take: Has Rick been hitting the sauce again?  Doesn’t he have better things to do, like ogle Erin Andrews or something?  Sigh …]

• Ken Davidoff is NOT a fan of A.J. Burnett:

If you’re going to invest $82.5 million in a guy in part because he pitches well against the Red Sox – rather than, you know, his larger body of work – then what choice do we have but to crush him when said guy doesn’t deliver on his alleged skill set?

The blame must fall on the $82.5-million man Burnett, who has pitched horribly in his two starts against the Red Sox as a Yankee, last night’s worst than his first. . . .

In two starts against the Sawx this season, both at Fenway, Burnett is 0-1 with a 12.91 ERA.

That doesn’t quite live up to the career numbers versus Boston – 5-0 with a 2.56 ERA, in eight starts – that he brought to last winter’s negotiations.

• Johnny Damon is on a mission . . . :

Johnny Damon wants the Yankees to get back to the postseason for many reasons. One is to prove Joe Torre wrong.

Damon said Torre’s book, “The Yankee Years,” has “fired” him up to have a big season. The ex-Red Sox star went into last night’s Battle for First at Fenway batting .299 with 12 home runs, 34 RBIs and five stolen bases.

“It really did,” Damon, 35, told The Post, “because it was a private matter. This game is a team game. Me and Jason [Giambi] weren’t the reason we were losing. If [Torre] feels that way, then, oh well, but I’ll tell you one thing, me and Jason were the reason why we made the playoffs [in 2007]. We made that push. As soon as I got healthy, this team got going.”

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Chien-Ming Wang’s start in Boston Wednesday night was a set-back for both the pitcher and the team. Wang had velocity, frequently hitting 95 miles per hour on the YES gun, and movement, but much like A.J. Burnett the night before, he had no control. It was almost as if the Red Sox had ball-repelling magnets installed under home plate.

Wang look good striking out Kevin Youkilis and Jason Bay to end the second inning, but by then he’d already given up three runs on three hits and three walks and thrown 58 pitches. He tried to start the third with a gimme strike to Mike Lowell, but Lowell parked it on top of the Green Monster to give the Red Sox a 4-1 lead (the Yankee run came on a Jorge Posada homer off Tim Wakefield leading off the second). David Ortiz followed by lifting a 400-foot fly out to center, and Mark Kotsay hit a hard single up the middle on Wang’s next pitch. A batter later, Wang was out of the game having thrown just 57 percent of his 69 pitches for strikes.

Phil Hughes pitched admirably over 3 2/3 innings in relief of Wang, striking out five men along the way, but he got into some bad counts in the fourth and wound up throwing two very hittable fastballs to J.D. Drew and Kevin Youkilis, resulting in a triple and an opposite-field homer, giving the Sox two crucial insurance runs.

The Yankee offense chipped away. A pair of walks set up a Melky Cabrera RBI single in the fourth. Mark Teixeira hit right-handed against Wakefield and went 3-for-3 against the knuckleballer with a single and a double off the Monster and another double down the left field line. That last came leading off the fifth and two groundouts plated Tex with the third Yankee run. Switched back to the left side against Ramon Ramirez in the seventh, Teixeira followed a Johnny Damon lead-off homer with a solo shot of his own to bring the Yankees within 6-5.

Unfortunately, that’s as close as they’d get. Nick Swisher worked a walk off Hideki Okajima to start the eighth, Brett Gardner ran for him, and Melky Cabrera bunted Gardner to second, but Derek Jeter (an ugly 0-for-5) struck out, as did Damon, stranding Gardner, who never attempted a steal.

In the ninth, Alex Rodriguez ignored the Fenway crowd’s “You Did Ste-Roids!” chant to work a one-out walk against Jonathan Papelbon, and pinch-runner Ramiro Peña stole second in his place, but Robinson Cano struck out and Jorge Posada flied out to the warning track in left to end the game.

After the game, Posada seemed more fed up with Wang’s struggles than frustrated by them, Wang said he would understand if the Yankees wanted to move him back into the bullpen, and Joe Girardi uncharacteristically refused to say that Wang would make his next start, or even to say “he’s in the rotation right now” (his typical code for “but won’t be five days from now”). Given how well Hughes pitched by comparison, I’d expect the two to swap roles next time around.

Barring injury, last night’s series opener couldn’t have gone much worse for the Yankees. Now their remaining hopes of winning this series rest on tonight’s starter, Chien-Ming Wang, who hasn’t thrown more than 4 2/3 innings in a major league game this year and hasn’t been good for more than three frames in a single outing.

Wang returned to the rotation on Thursday and looked great for two innings, showing the velocity and drop on his sinker the Yankees had been waiting to see, but things flattened out after that, and he left with two outs in the fifth having surrendered five runs to the Rangers. Still, he got all but one of his 14 outs via groundball or strikeout, which was encouraging. Wang will be on a 90-pitch limit tonight, which could mean another short outing even if he pitches well (though Wang at his best could make those 90 pitches last into the eighth).

Also encouraging is that, after a strong April, Tim Wakefield, who starts tonight for Boston, has posted a 6.37 ERA over his last seven starts with opponents hitting .307/.393/.452 against him. Wakefield is 5-2 over that stretch as the Sox have scored an average of 7.14 runs per game for him. As much as I’m thinking good thoughts for Wang, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a slugfest like that break out again tonight.  At the very least, the Yankees should do better than the two measly singles they managed last night.

The lineup returns to normal tonight (Damon in left, Swisher in right, Matsui to DH, though Matsui has hit just .170/.264/.319 lifetime against Wakefield), while rookie George Kottaras catches Wakefield for Boston.

I’ve been fishing twice in my life–once on a lake, another time in the Long Island sound. A long time ago. I don’t recall much other than being bored. Fishing was something kids were supposed to enjoy–like flying a kite or building model airplaines–but I never took to it. Too much patience for a blabbermouth like me. Still, I appreciate why certain men love to fish. Y’all have any good fishing stories?

Also, has anyone read A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean? I have not, but from what I hear it is a wonderfully written book. Here is an excerpt:

After my brother and I became good fishermen, we realized that our father was not a great fly caster, but he was accurate and stylish and wore a glove on his casting hand. As he buttoned his glove in preparation to giving us a lesson, he would say, “It is an art that is performed on a four-count rhythm between ten and two o’clock.”

As a Scot and a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from an original state of grace. Somehow, I early developed the notion that he had done this by falling from a tree. As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God’s rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word “beautiful.”

After he buttoned his glove, he would hold his rod straight out in front of him, where it trembled with the beating of his heart. Although it was eight and a half feet long, it weighed only four and a half ounces. It was made of split bamboo cane from the far-off Bay of Tonkin. It was wrapped with red and blue silk thread, and the wrappings were carefully spaced to make the delicate rod powerful but not so stiff it could not tremble.

Killer job by the BA crew live-blogging the draft yesterday. Here is what Rich Lederer and Marc Hulet have to say about Slade Heathcott:

Rich: Heathcott wouldn’t have been available had he not been injured or had personal issues. He might ask for more than slot but the Yankees can afford to give it to him. Don’t see New York losing its first-round pick two years in a row.

Marc: Nice, nice pick by the Yankees. Definitely fell because of makeup issues and he has the talent to be a monster.

Rich: I saw Heathcott hit and pitch at the Area Code Games last August. I also watched how he carried himself after the game. The kid seemed a little cocky to me and has enough hot dog in him that he did a cartwheel and back flip before the Aflac Classic in honor of Ozzie Smith, who was the honorary chairman. But there is no doubting his talent. Hit 91 on the gun and struck out the side (although not in order). He hit a groundball single up the middle in one of the two ABs I witnessed. Grounded out to shortstop in the other. In the Aflac game, he went with a pitch on the outside corner and singled in a run against Zack Wheeler in the first inning that gave the West an early 1-0 lead. He also pitched the ninth inning and was saddled with the loss after giving up four runs. I wrote down “most athletic player” next to his name on my scoresheet even though I didn’t care for his attitude.

Today’s (brief) news is powered by a dog-tired day-after-birthday girl who has a sore throat (too much rain, and insomnia).

• Teixeira takes over lead at 1B in the All Star balloting.
• Nady may be able to return late next week?
• Why all the homers? Its not the wind, but the height and curvature of the walls.
• A fan planted Yankee grass seed in Fenway Park last month.
• Mo gets a judge’s robe for his next Kangaroo Court.
• OF Slade Heathcott is Yanks’ 1st round amateur draft pick.
• A father and son are trying to see the Yankees win in all 30 parks.
• Tyler Hepner wonders what the Yankees should do with Hughes.

Back with a more-normal report tomorrow.

AJ Burnett has pitched small in his two starts at Fenway Park this year. S-m-all. Like a bum. Burnett threw more than sixty pitches by the end of the second inning. Gave up a two-run home run to David Ortiz–yes, that David Ortiz–and, after an error by Alex Rodriguez, a two-run double to JD Drew. Burnett didn’t make it out of the third. Five runs. Bum.

That was really all Josh Beckett needed as the Sox cruised back into a tie for first place with the Yankees. 7-0 was the final. The Yanks did collect two hits…oy.

New York is now 0-6 against Boston this year. The sooner we can forget about this one, the better.  Yup, nothing but a bowl of  crybaby chowder for the New Yorkers.

The Yankees look to reboot their season series with the Red Sox with three games in Boston starting tonight. They’re 0-5 against the Bosox entering the series, but hold a one-game lead over Boston in the American League East and have played their best baseball in the month since the two team’s last met. Dig:

April 6 to May 7

Red Sox 18-11 (.621)
Yankees 13-15 (.464)

May 8 to June 8

Yankees 21-8 (.724)
Red Sox 15-13 (.536)

Take out their five head-to-head games, and the Yankees outplayed the Sox against neutral opponents during the season’s first month as well (13-10 to 13-11). Having taken series from all of the league’s other winning teams (the Rays, Jays, Rangers, Tigers, and Angels), all the Yankees have left to prove in the first half of this season is that they can beat the Red Sox head-to-head.

Not that it is likely to matter in the short run. As I wrote in my initial Red Sox preview in April, since the implementation of the unbalanced schedule in 2001, the season series between these two teams hasn’t put one team in the playoffs while keeping the other out, and all signs point to both making it to the postseason again this year. Still, bragging rights are fun, and despite the Yankees’ dominance of the league over the past month, the Red Sox still hold them.

The big news in Boston is that David Ortiz seems to have gone from hero to zero for realsies, forcing Terry Francona to drop him to sixth in the order. Ortiz actually enters this series on a six-game hitting streak and hit his second homer of the year on Saturday, but he’s still hitting just .197/.288/.308 on the season. I had figured Ortiz for a quick decline following his wrist injury last year, but I never thought he’d just vanish like this, which probably means he’ll pull out of it. Just look at Jason Varitek. The Red Sox’s catcher looked washed up last year when he hit .220/.313/.359 at age 36, but he has rebounded this year, hitting a solid .247/.337/.519 with ten homers.

Despite Ortiz’s vanishing act, what the Sox have done well this season is hit (fourth in the majors in runs scored per game) and pitch out of the bullpen (major league best 2.76 pen ERA). What they have not done well is field (second-worst defensive efficiency in the AL) and start games (fifth-worst starters ERA in baseball at 5.02).

Tonight’s starter, Josh Beckett, leads the Sox rotation with a 4.09 ERA and is the only Boston start to have an ERA below league average. Beckett had a terrible April, including allowing eight runs in five innings to the Yankees at Fenway on April 25, but he’s been awesome in May, going 4-0 with a 1.94 ERA in six starts and posting a 0.40 ERA across 22 2/3 innings over his last three starts.

A.J. Burnett, who helped turned that April Beckett blow-up into a Red Sox win by also allowing eight runs in five innings, again starts against his former Marlins rotationmate. In his six starts from that first match-up against Beckett through his return to Toronto on May 12, Burnett went 0-2 with a 6.34 ERA, but he rebounded nicely in his last two starts, both wins over Texas. In those two games, he posted a combined line of 13 IP, 11 H, 3 R, 1 HR, 5 BB, 15 K. Some more of that would help get the Yankees’ reboot off this series off on the right foot.

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Today is the annual baseball draft. The good folks over at The Baseball Analysts are live-blogging the event. 

Check, check it out.

Bronx Banter Interview

By Hank Waddles

For Yankee fans, Roger Clemens is a difficult case — even before all his recent steroid trouble. If you’re of my generation, you grew up despising him. Even though he pitched for Boston during an era when we all knew the Red Sox would never win anything, he was still a fearsome enemy. He was the gunslinger who stole your girlfriend before shooting the sheriff right between the eyes on his way out of town. There was some pleasure to be had when his skills began to decline during his twilight years in Boston, but it wasn’t too much of a surprise when he became great again — if irrelevant — during his time in Toronto. And when he came to New York in 1999, if all wasn’t forgotten, at least it was put aside. First of all, the Yanks were adding the best pitcher in the game; second, they were twisting the knife in the heart of Red Sox Nation. It was a win-win.

Roger helped the Yankees to a couple more championships, won his 300th game, endeared himself to the Boss and legions of fans, and said all the right things about wearing a Yankee cap into the Hall of Fame. But then came the defection to Houston, the self-serving Stadium announcement of his return to New York, and, finally, the steroid allegations. There was an embarrassment that we had once embraced him, and the ashes in our mouths were there to remind us that we had gotten exactly what we deserved.

But there is more to Roger Clemens. Sure, he cut corners, but he also worked harder than any of his teammates. Yes, he is hopelessly selfish and egotistical, but he’d be the first player to volunteer for visits to children’s hospitals. Whether you loved him once or never at all, whether you think he deserves a plaque in Cooperstown or a spot in Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell, you have to admit that Roger Clemens matters. In Jeff Pearlman’s latest book, The Rocket That Fell to Earth: Roger Clemens and the Rage for Baseball Immortality, he does his typically thorough job of cutting through the Roger Clemens mythology and getting to the heart of the man who was once considered one of the five greatest pitchers of all time. A few weeks ago Jeff was generous enough to spend part of his morning talking with me about the book, the steroid era, and a few other topics. Enjoy…

BronxBanter:  You’ve said that you love writing books, but when I spoke to you a while back while you were deep in this one, you described it as hell. How do those two things go together?

Pearlman:  The only thing I can really compare it to is running marathons. I run a lot of marathons. When I first start running a marathon, I’m really excited, and I love the first thirteen miles, and then the next four miles I sort of start feeling it, and then once you hit the twenties you start thinking, “I’m never gonna do this again. I’m neeeever doing this again.” And when you cross the finish line your first thought is, “Thank god this is over so I never have to do it again.” And then ten minutes later you’re thinking about the next marathon. And that’s how I feel about writing books. It’s nightmarish. It’s hellish. You’re solely focused — usually for a year and a half or two years — on one person, one subject, for all that time. You’re looking for these little details that seem insignificant to someone who doesn’t do it for a living, I would guess, but they become these gold nuggets for you. Finding out what someone used to drink for breakfast in the morning, silly little things like that that you think mean nothing, but they mean everything when you’re working on a book. Detail is what counts. When I was a kid I read every book imaginable, every sports book I could find, and I didn’t really differentiate between the good ones and the bad ones and the mediocre ones because I didn’t know any better. But now, when I’m reading someone else’s book, I really am looking for the details. If you’re writing a book about Reggie Jackson, everybody knows all there is to know about his three home run game in the World Series, but when you learn what sort of glasses he was wearing or where he got his hair cut or what he was saying to Mickey Rivers right before the game, that’s interesting.

BB:  How does that compare to writing feature articles? You used the marathon analogy; are these just sprints if you’re writing a piece for SI or some other magazine?

JP:  One of the best pieces of advice I got for writing a book was when I was doing my first book, which was about the Mets. Jon Wertheim, who is a friend of mine and writes for SI, said to me, the best thing you can do is think of each chapter as an article, as a lengthy article. So I would compare an article, if it’s long, to writing a chapter. And a book is just like a big monsoon.

BB:  I heard David Maraniss say once that it was much easier to write about dead people. If he was writing a biography about a living subject – and I think he was referring to his Clinton book – he would just pretend that the person was dead. Did you seek out Clemens at all, or did you pretend he was dead?

JP:  Well, I did reach out, and it was made clear he wouldn’t talk. Hence, it really was as if he was dead to me. I didn’t think of it in Maraniss’s terms, but he’s 100% right. And it’s definitely easier to write about a deceased person, because:
A. He won’t come back and say, “That’s not right.”
B. You don’t waste all that time trying to get him to talk.
C. People are more open when they know the person won’t get mad.
D. He can’t sue you for anything.

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On the second-to-last day of my time on the Bronx Grand Jury, we ordered pizza for lunch. There were leftovers and one of my fellow jurors, a full-bodied and robust woman, told me, “Save that for the mornin, baby. I don’t care if it’s cold, my stomach don’t don’t know what time it is, only knows that it’s hongry.”

We’ve covered pizza here lately, but can we ever talk too much about it? Didn’t think so.

Peep this from Theeatenpath.

A few months ago I eagerly read Adam Hochschild’s celebrated book about the early days of the Belgian Congo, King Leopold’s Ghost. It is an evocative and engaging read. I was stopped on the subway twice, exactly one week apart, by women saw me reading the book and who were compelled to tell me how much they loved it. I have my own reasons for appreciating it–my mother spent most of her childhood in the Congo–but I think I admire Hochschild’s first effort, a memoir, Half the Way Home, even more.

Hochschild’s father was an industrialist. The family fortune was copper. They were plenty rich. Hochschild’s memoir is beautiful–empathetic, not vicious. It is written in the kind of clean, direct prose that I cherish. Everything is carefully considered and focused; I was often struck by what seemed to be left out, how many choices must have been made. There is no fat, no rambling digressions. The imagery is vivid and precise.

Here is a small sample. Hochschild describes being a boy at Eagle’s Nest, the family estate in the Adirondack mountains.

Dig this:

Bed. The time seemed endless, suspended between waking and sleep, between water and sky. Sometimes a guest played the piano, and from my bed I could hear the music echoing out across the smooth surface of the lake. Occasionally, if I woke later in the evening, I could hear the splashing and laughter and voices from the dock which meant that some of the younger guests were taking a furtive late-night swim–something out of the question during the day. Those sounds, too, merged in my mind with that of the music on the water; they seemed an image of promise, of something yearned for but undefined, of the existence of some fulfillment in life that was denied me. It was as if all year I had waited to come here for the summer; all day I had held my breath waiting for some magic moment, and now I saw only its sign; the secret remained locked away.

As I drifted to sleep there came the sound of a solitary outboard motor going slowly through the lake, a boat taking a lone fisherman home at the end of the day. Perhaps he looked up as he passed, and wondered what went on in the dark-browed houses among the trees. Then the hollow cry of a loon, the loneliest of all birds. And the calls of half a dozen other birds, whose names I did not know but whose sounds I will remember until the day I die. And just as the day ended, so did the week, with Father going, and the summer, with all of us leaving Eagle Nest, and finally those summers themselves were no more; their character gradually changed, and the exact moment that happened cannot be pinpointed, any more than you can mark the exact moment you fall asleep.

On a warm Monday night at the Stadium, the first inning foreshadowed the rest of the series finale between the Yankees and Rays. Three Yankees hit long fly balls against Rays starter Andy Sonnanstine in that initial frame, including Mark Teixeira’s towering home run into the second deck of the right-field stands. The Yankees would hit several more long drives against Sonnanstine in later innings, including home runs by Nick Swisher (a two-run homer), Johnny Damon (a solo shot), and Derek Jeter (also a solo blast), all big parts of a 5-3 win over Sonnanstine and the Rays. The four home runs accounted for all of the Yankee scoring against Sonnanstine, who entered the game with an ERA of over seven.

Damon’s sixth-inning home run provided the winning margin. With the score tied at 3-3 and one man out in the bottom of the sixth, Damon launched his 12th home run of the season, easily reaching the right field seats. Two innings later, Jeter padded the lead with a leadoff home run, again hit to the familiar bull’s-eye region in right field.

Andy Pettitte’s first inning also provided a glimpse into his overall performance against the Rays. After loading the bases, Pettitte escaped on Joe Dillon’s slow roller to shortstop, handled deftly by Derek Jeter. Pettitte managed to escape from every jam he faced except for the third inning, when he permitted all three Tampa Bay runs. Though Pettitte struck out a season-high seven batters, he allowed five hits and three walks in what turned out to be a workmanlike effort at the Stadium. For his career, Pettitte has now won 16 of 20 decisions against the Tampa Bay franchise.

The two Phils, as I’m sure they’ve already been dubbed, then turned in standout relief efforts in the seventh and eighth innings. Phil Hughes, showing increased velocity with a 95 mile-an-hour fastball in his 2009 relief debut, pitched a 1-2-3 seventh. (The successful appearance will surely fuel speculation that Hughes will be used in Joba Chamberlain’s old role as the primary bridge to Mariano Rivera.) Phil Coke then followed with a scoreless eighth, setting the table for another masterful ninth inning by Mariano. More than 48 hours removed from his Saturday afternoon horror show, Rivera logged his second straight 1-2-3 appearance, capped off by a 93 mile-per-hour fastball thrown past the elevated swing of B.J. Upton.

The Yankees, now equipped with a full game lead in the American League East, will prepare for the start of a three-game series against the reviled Red Sox. It remains to be seen whether Rivera will be available for the first game at Fenway Park on Tuesday night, given that he has pitched three straight days. Joe Girardi says he’s inclined to give Rivera the night off, but the future Hall of Famer may attempt to talk his manager out of that plan, especially after throwing only 11 pitches in Monday night’s finale against the Rays.

Yankee Doodles: Nick Swisher was the only Yankee to pick up more than one hit against Rays pitching. With his 2-for-3 against Sonnanstine, Swisher lifted his batting average to a more respectable .257… Former Yankee left-hander Randy “The Snake” Choate made his second appearance of the series. The journeyman sidewinder, who was once part of the package sent to the Montreal Expos for Javier Vazquez, struck out Johnny Damon and walked Mark Teixeira in the eighth inning before being lifted in favor of former Met Jason Isringhausen. Isringhausen induced an inning-end double play from Alex Rodriguez, who heard a smattering of boos after going 0-for-3 with an error at third base… Former Red Sox outfielder Gabe Kapler hit a two-run homer for the Rays, his first of the season.

Yanks look to take the series from the Rays before they head up to Boston for the yelling and the screaming and mishegoss. Couple of guys named Andy on the hill this evening.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

Our man in Japan’s got a cool blog cookin…

Dig.

My wife Emily took me out to lunch on Saturday. We had a meal at Momofuku and then dessert at the Milk Bar. Both places are full packed full of young Hipster Doofus couples. (What do you call a group of them? Hipster Dufi? Sounds like the name of a second-rate Indie Rock band.) My friend Alex joined us. Emily got the pre-fix, which included a salad of bitter greens with guanciale and orange zest. Alex and I had the pork buns, of course, and we shared a lovely dish of sugar snap peas in a sour cream-horseradish sauce served with thinly-sliced radishes (a variation of the dish is pictured below).

The peas must have been par-boiled. Sugar snaps are so fresh and delicious that you don’t need to do much to them. Chang dressed them up nicely–the sauce was subtle, the flavors still direct and satisfying–without overwhelming them. The peas popped as you chewed them and made me so happy that all I could think of while eating them was ordering more.

I didn’t, since I knew we’d be toolin’ around for the next few hours in the heat. It’s likely that I won’t see that dish the next time I roll through either. The menu changes constantly at Momofuku. In fact, the next day, it was no longer being served.

Savor while you can.

Today’s news is powered by quite possibly my FAVORITE scene in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” . . . (It helps if you imagine Lonn Trost as the fellow on top of the castle, and any generic dad wanting to take his kids to the game as King Arthur) 🙂

• Bruney elbowing his way back towards the bullpen:

Yankees reliever Brian Bruney took what he called a “huge positive step” on Sunday after completing a 30-pitch bullpen session. Bruney pronounced himself pain-free (yes, we’ve heard that one before, and no, I didn’t check to see if his nose was growing).

To simulate a game, Bruney threw 15 pitches, rested four minutes, then threw 15 more. In his second round, bullpen coach Mike Harkey stood in the batters’ box for several pitches. Bruney expects to throw a similar session again during the team’s trip to Boston.

“I think we’re definitely going in the right direction,” said Bruney, who this season has fibbed about his achy elbow. “I feel good.”

• Steve Serby Q&A’s Johnny Damon:

Q: I thought you were washed up.

A: (Smiles) Sometimes when you hear it enough, you start questioning yourself, and then you find something, you reach down, and you go out and start proving people wrong again.

Q: So that lit a fire under you?

A: When they started saying I was washed up, well, I had a pulled calf muscle. So what helped me start my playing days in baseball was now wrecking it — my legs have always been my most important asset. . . . So as soon as my legs got healthy, I was able to turn it back around

• Rivera battled more than the Rays on Saturday:

For several hours before Rivera took the ball Saturday afternoon in that tie game, he’d suffered with a stomach ailment that brought aches and repeated vomiting, according to one Yankee. Rivera had rolled off the trainer’s table, where he’d hoped to sleep it off, and into the bullpen in the eighth inning, when he began to warm up.

So, no, he didn’t have his best command. And, no, he didn’t have his best fastball.

But, he didn’t sprinkle the Yankee Stadium mound with breakfast, which, in itself, was a small victory, even in defeat.

“He was so upset afterward,” the teammate said.

And yet, Rivera did not mention it after the game, and he did not reveal it late Sunday afternoon, when it would have played less like an excuse than, in victory, the simple retelling of a trying 30 hours. He did not hang those hittable fastballs or that loss on his illness. He did not blame manager Joe Girardi for asking him to pitch in a tie game when a healthier body might have – and probably should have – done.

[My take: A tummy-troubled Rivera was the best option the Yanks had in a tie game in the ninth inning?]

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