Monthly Archives: December 2009

A Halladay, a Lackey…which one of these?

It’s gray Saturday, and raining in New York.

Stay warm y’all.

The Fellas…

Groucho: Say, if you get near a song, play it.

Chico:…I can’t think of the finish.

Groucho: That’s strange and I can’t think of anything else.

Chico: You know what I think, I think I went past it.

Groucho: Well, if you come around again, jump off.

Chico: I once kept this up for three days…

The A-Side (instrumental) of Eddie Kendrick’s classic Keep on Truckin’:

Here is the full-length vocal, just cause:

By Bruce Markusen

This week’s passing of Tommy Henrich brings to mind the understated value of a terrific ballplayer who sacrificed part of his career for a larger cause.

On the surface, Henrich’s Triple Crown numbers don’t sound like that of a Hall of Famer: .282 batting average, 183 home runs, and 795 RBIs. But let’s look at what could have been. Henrich missed three full seasons in the midst of his prime—his age 30, 31, and 32 seasons—while serving in the U.S. military during World War II. If Henrich had been able to play and post even “average” seasons during that span—let’s say 20 home runs and 85 RBIs per season—he would have finished his career with over 240 home runs and over 1,000 RBIs. Those are far more impressive numbers, especially within the context of Henrich’s percentages. For his career, Henrich compiled an on-base percentage of .382 and a slugging percentage of .491, both favorable numbers. On top of that, Henrich was a smart, disciplined hitter who walked nearly twice as often as he struck out. He also played a solid defensive right field, helping to form one of the great outfields in baseball history, teamed with Joe DiMaggio in center and the similarly overlooked King Kong Keller in left. Finally, let’s throw Henrich’s four world championship rings into the argument, and suddenly we have a far more viable candidate for the Hall of Fame.

I’m a firm believer that Hall of Fame candidates who lost playing time during the war deserve some kind of “war credit” for what they might have achieved. After all, these men often had no choice but to enlist in the military; many of them also felt a civic and patriotic duty to do so. Their responsibility and bravery should not be held against them. The crux of the matter is this: exactly how much war credit do we give these players for time lost in service? Each case varies, given the length of military service and the time that it occurred within a player’s career. In the case of Henrich, he enjoyed three of his finest seasons after the war, so it’s reasonable to assume that the three years he lost fell in the midst of what we should rightfully consider his peak or prime. That becomes a huge chunk of war credit, and perhaps it’s enough to put Henrich right on the Cooperstown village limits.

Beyond the Hall of Fame argument, Henrich has drawn plenty of praise for his solid standing as a teammate and his sterling reputation as an excellent player under pressure. He was widely known as “Old Reliable,” but I like his other nickname even more. He was occasionally called “The Clutch.” How cool is that? I can just hear one of today’s broadcasters saying, “The bases are loaded, the game is on the line, and hear comes ‘The Clutch.’ ” Henrich’s ability to produce in important situations has led some in the media to compare him to Derek Jeter, which is a reasonable comparison. I’ll offer another one. Henrich was Paul O’Neill without the footspeed. They both played the same position, both hit left-handed, both hit with similar levels of power. Of course, O’Neill is not a Hall of Famer, but he was an underrated player who was hugely important to the Yankee dynasty from 1996 to 2001. Henrich was a similarly underrated player who spread his contributions throughout the decade of the 1940s. And with that extra war credit, maybe he was a little bit better than O’Neill, maybe good enough to be knocking on the front door of the Hall of Fame…

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Here’s Tom Verducci’s Sportsman of the Year profile of Derek Jeter from the latest issue of Sports Illustrated. I like how he ends it:  “The great wonder is not that Jeter has won so much but that he has won so well. He is the good son, the good winner.”

Marco Scutaro, an appealing middle infielder who once hit a game-winning home run off Mariano Rivera, has signed a two-year deal to play shortstop for the Boston Red Sox. Scutaro was a featured player in the low-budget but winning 2004 documentary about life in the minor leagues, A Player to Be Named Later.

One of my favorites from one of my favorites:

If you haven’t seen this terrific piece by Jeanne Marie Laskas on concussions and the lasting effects of playing football, you should, it is outstanding:

On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner’s office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player. Omalu did not, unlike most 34-year-old men living in a place like Pittsburgh, have an appreciation for American football. He was born in the jungles of Biafra during a Nigerian air raid, and certain aspects of American life puzzled him. From what he could tell, football was rather a pointless game, a lot of big fat guys bashing into each other. In fact, had he not been watching the news that morning, he may not have suspected anything unusual at all about the body on the slab.

The coverage that week had been bracing and disturbing and exciting. Dead at 50. Mike Webster! Nine-time Pro Bowler. Hall of Famer. “Iron Mike,” legendary Steelers center for fifteen seasons. His life after football had been mysterious and tragic, and on the news they were going on and on about it. What had happened to him? How does a guy go from four Super Bowl rings to…pissing in his own oven and squirting Super Glue on his rotting teeth? Mike Webster bought himself a Taser gun, used that on himself to treat his back pain, would zap himself into unconsciousness just to get some sleep. Mike Webster lost all his money, or maybe gave it away. He forgot. A lot of lawsuits. Mike Webster forgot how to eat, too. Soon Mike Webster was homeless, living in a truck, one of its windows replaced with a garbage bag and tape.

It bothered Omalu to hear this kind of chatter—especially about a dead guy. But Omalu had always fancied himself an advocate for the dead. That’s how he viewed his job: a calling. A forensic pathologist was charged with defending and speaking for the departed—a translator for those still here. A corpse held a story, told in tissue, patterns of trauma, and secrets in cells.

Jay Jaffe on the Yankees not offering arbitration to Johnny Damon, Hideki Matusi or Andy Pettitte:

The Yankees’ only Type A free agent is Johnny Damon, who’s coming off an excellent season capped by a key role in the team’s World Series win. He made $13 million a year over the life of his deal, but just turned 36. A one-year deal for him to return via arbitration might have cost the Yankees $15 million, a figure that apparently was too rich for Brian Cashman’s blood. Damon’s got a strong enough hand that he can likely do better in length if not average annual salary, even from the Yankees (two years, $25 million with an option, perhaps).

What’s annoying is that because he’s a Type A, foregoing the arbitration offer costs the Yankees two high draft picks, one in the 16-30 range of the draft (the top 15 picks are protected), the other in the supplemental phase (31-50, roughly speaking). That’s a substantial amount of value; four years ago, colleague Nate Silver estimated those two picks as worth $9 million for the 16-30 and $3 million for the supplemental. Since then, the market has leveled off, inflation has occurred, and WARP has changed, but if anything, the value of those picks is probably higher. Apparently, the fear of being stuck with a pricey one-year deal — though really, it’s difficult to get too badly burned on such a pact — outweighed the return for the Yanks, offering further evidence that even Cashman is on a budget.

The Yankees also decided not to offer arbitration to Andy Pettitte and Hideki Matsui, but both of them are Type B free agents, meaning all the Yankees turned down was the right to supplemental picks worth about $3 million apiece. Weighed against the higher likelihood that both would accept and win their cases at prices out of Cashman’s control, again, the risk was apparently too great. It’s still a likelihood that at least Pettitte returns; the most recent Collective Bargaining Agreement struck down a provision that teams who didn’t offer arbitration to their free agents were prevented from signing them until the following spring. Now, the two sides can hopefully negotiate a more sensible deal.

Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

A Streetcar Named Desire…was directed by [Elia] Kazan, who seems to have an instinct for the best of both [Arthur] Miller and Williams. It is perhaps the most misunderstood of his plays: the English and French productions were both so blatantly sensationalised that Williams’ underlying fibre passed unnoticed. If Willy Loman is the desperate average man, Blanche DuBois is the desperate exceptional woman. Willy’s collapse began when his son walked into a hotel apartment and found him with a whore; Blanche’s when she entered “a room that I thought was empty” and found her young husband embracing an older man. In each instance the play builds up to a climax involving guilt and concomitant disgust. Blanche, nervously boastful, lives in the leisured past; her defense against actuality is a sort of aristocratic Bovarysme, at which her brutish brother-in-law Stanley repeatedly sneers. Characteristically, Williams keeps his detachment and does not take sides: he never denies that Stanley’s wife, in spite of her sexual enslavement, is happy and well-adjusted, nor does he exaggerate the cruelty with which Stanley reveals to Blanche’s new suitor secrets of her nymphomaniac past. The play’s weakness lies in the fact that the leading role lends itself to grandiose overplaying by unintelligent actresses…

Kenneth Tynan, 1954

Nobody has ever confused Cate Blanchett with not being an intelligent actress. But man, dig this rave review of Liv Ullman’s new production of Streetcar from the Times theater critic, Ben Brantley:

Blanche DuBois may well be the great part for an actress in the American theater, and I have seen her portrayed by an assortment of formidable stars including Jessica Lange, Glenn Close, Patricia Clarkson and Natasha Richardson. Yet there’s a see-sawing between strength and fragility in Blanche, and too often those who play her fall irrevocably onto one side or another.

Watching such portrayals, I always hear the voice of Vivien Leigh, the magnificent star of Elia Kazan’s 1951 movie, whispering Blanche’s lines along with the actress onstage. But with this “Streetcar,” the ghosts of Leigh — and, for that matter, of Marlon Brando, the original Stanley — remain in the wings. All the baggage that any “Streetcar” usually travels with has been jettisoned. Ms. Ullmann and Ms. Blanchett have performed the play as if it had never been staged before, with the result that, as a friend of mine put it, “you feel like you’re hearing words you thought you knew pronounced correctly for the first time.”

This newly lucid production of a quintessentially American play comes to us via a Norwegian director, best known as an actress in the brooding Swedish films of Ingmar Bergman, and an Australian movie star, famous for impersonating historical figures like Elizabeth I and Katharine Hepburn. Blessed perhaps with an outsider’s distance on an American cultural monument, Ms. Ullmann and Ms. Blanchett have, first of all, restored Blanche to the center of “Streetcar.”

I haven’t been to the theater in years but this sounds like a memorable experience for those lucky few who’ll get to see it.

One of the things that interests me here, is how Brando’s performance in movie version of Streetcar, and presumably the original stage version too, was so stunning that it overshadowed the lead character. The role wasn’t minor exactly, but it wasn’t the central character, and his performance was towering, seminal. What are some other examples of a supporting performance dominating a production?

These are all over the place (and some are really minor characters more than even supporting ones), but off the top of my head, here’s a few: Orson Wells in The Third Man, Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider, Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, John Turturro in Miller’s Crossing, and Joe Pesci in Good Fellas.

Today’s update is powered by one of PIXAR’s early efforts:

• The Jays have their eyes set on the cream of the Yankees youngsters in a deal for Halladay.
• Brian Cashman picks the Captain’s brain on some potential moves?
• Roberto Alomar comments on Robinson Cano:

He still keeps an eye on the current Bombers, including a certain second baseman who reminds Alomar of himself – the flashy, gifted (and often nonchalant) Robinson Cano.

“When you have too much talent, you can end up playing that way,” Alomar said of Cano. “But I do think Robinson is going to be an MVP and Gold Glover. That’s how good he is. The rest is up to him.”

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My work ID gets me into several city museums for free, including the Museum of Modern Art, which is a good thing because otherwise I’d never go. The idea of paying twenty bucks to go to a museum rubs me the wrong way, bless Washington D.C. Sometimes, I’ll head over for even just ten minutes during my lunch break to stimulate my eyes. Plus, it feels like being on vacation, what with all the tourists, perfumed and looking nice (what is it about art museums that makes people dress-up?).

My favorite spot–in the old Modern and the new one–is the Matisse room.

Reproductions can’t do the paintings justice, of course, but this here is the picture I’d die for:

It hangs next to The Piano Lesson. I sit and swoon.

It is incredible to me how I never tire of looking at my favorite pictures. It is as if the paintings are living and breathing things. They never get old. There is always something new to see.

I don’t weep easily at movies or books or music even. But great paintings, for whatever reason, bring me to the brink.

Lena Olin in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

Oooh La La…

Here’s a Disco record:

Tyler Kepner with the latest on Johnny Damon:

The Yankees did not offer salary arbitration to Johnny Damon on Tuesday, which may not be such a bad thing. Damon, who is in Paris, said he was encouraged.

“In a better position since teams won’t lose draft picks,” Damon said in a text message. “Will now wait and see what develops.”

If the Yankees believed Damon could receive a better offer on the open market, they probably would have made the arbitration offer and taken draft picks if he signed elsewhere. By making no offer, the Yankees are again predicting a severely depressed market for free agents.

Damon is in Paris, Alex Rodriguez is in London. Life is good for the World Champs.

Cliff hipped me to a terrific interview with Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner at the Onion’s AV Club:

AVC: Carl, you’ve said in other interviews that you’re against analyzing comedy. Why is that?

CR: Well, people have a comic bent or an angularity to their thinking, and those are the people who make jokes. And it’s usually people who were in an environment, when they were young, where jokes were at a premium, or at least considered important to a life. My parents always listened to the comedy radio shows, we went to the comedy movies, and my parents appreciated comedy. So kids listen and follow what their parents like.

AVC: Do you think comedy is something you can teach somebody?

CR: No. There are people born with intelligence; you’re not born with a funny bone. If you’re just a normal thing, the palette is there; it just depends on who puts the paint on the palette, and what they put on the palette when you’re very young. And then when you’re a little older and go to the movies by yourself, then you start making choices, and it’s usually honed by choices you made very early in your life.

MB: Where are you?

AVC: I’m in Chicago.

MB: I was always treated with love and respect and joy in Chicago.

According to Jon Heyman, Billy Wagner has signed a one-year deal with the Braves.

Tommy Henrich died today. He was 96, bless him.

Man won four rings with the Yanks.

It has clearly been a tough week for Tiger Woods. Over at Esquire, Charles Pierce weighs in with his take:

Tiger Woods and I go back a long ways. A little bit over twelve years, truth be told. Back then, I wrote a profile of him just prior to his winning the 1997 Masters, the first major accomplishment of his professional career. Over the course of a day’s worth of interviews, which were themselves the result of negotiations with his People at the International Management Group that were so protracted they should have been moved to Panmunjom, Tiger made some distasteful remarks and told some puerile and sexist jokes. Seeing as how they occurred during my limited interview time, I included them in my story, along with some not-overly-subtle intimations that Tiger had a reputation even among golfers as something of a chaser. The quotes were a Media Thing for a brief time, and the ensuing dust storm looks positively charming compared to what’s certainly coming after the events of this past weekend, which already appears to be something between Al Cowlings on the highway and an episode of The Real Housewives of Gated Communities. Back then, all that happened was that Tiger’s People at the International Management Group accused me of wiretapping a limo driver. (Me and Gordon Liddy!) And that Tiger’s father, Earl, whom I still miss, told Charlie Rose he hoped my story wouldn’t do permanent damage to his son’s career, and that Charlie Rose waved a copy of the magazine and told Earl he intended never to read the story. This is why Earl was an entertaining con man and Charlie Rose is a salon-sniffing Beltway yahoo.

Better still, Esquire has reprinted Pierce’s classic 1997 profile, “The Man. Amen.”

Well worth checking out.

Here’s an odd one, Luchi De Jesus’s cover of “Round Midnight.”

Will Leitch on Matt Holliday and the Yanks:

Holliday is exactly the player the Yankees need, a relatively young, high-average, hit-to-all-fields complete player who would look downright gorgeous batting fifth, behind A-Rod. He won’t turn 30 until January, and he’s a proven postseason performer (if you ignore his unfortunate dropped fly ball that cost the Cardinals Game 2 of their NLDS) and a sturdy lineup fixture. He’s not a Gary Sheffield/Jaret Wright type looking to cash in after a big year. He’s a cornerstone. The market is currently depressed for him, but only because the Yankees haven’t yet entered the bidding. If they want him, the Yankees can have him