Monthly Archives: April 2010

Admittedly, when your team finishes dead last and does so mostly with mediocre veterans and an insufficient amount of young talent, it’s difficult to find the silver lining. It’s sort of like the guy standing on the deck of Titanic shouting, “What a wonderful view we have of that shiny iceberg!” That’s the kind of blind optimism that all of us find annoying–if not downright nauseating.

If there was a bright spot to be found on the awful 1990 Yankees, it was Roberto Kelly. On a team bogged down with too many Bob Gerens and Oscar Azocars, Kelly was a legitimately talented prospect. He possessed four of the requisite five tools, lacking only in arm strength, which was merely average for a center fielder. Kelly also looked like a pure bred athlete. Long and lean, but well toned from top to bottom, Kelly played the game elegantly. Scouts looking for a recipe of future stardom did not need to look any farther than the graceful Kelly.

From day one, Kelly brandished a picturesque swing from the right side of the plate. I felt that if Kelly could improve his pitch-taking ability even slightly, he could become a consistent .310 to .320 hitter who could hit 25 home runs, steal 30 bases, and draw 50 to 60 walks a season. Well, it didn’t happen. In some ways, Kelly peaked during his 1989 season, when he batted .302 with 41 walks in his first full major league campaign. After that, his patience at the plate never improved, his batting average regressed substantially, and his strikeout totals mounted. Offensively, Kelly increased only his power, as he reached a high of 20 home runs in 1991. Even in the outfield, Kelly’s progress seemed to flatline. Although he covered a substantial amount of ground with his gliding gait, he sometimes made bad breaks on batted balls and too often looped his throws into no-man’s land. Instead of getting better, Kelly simply stagnated, and in some areas, retrenched into mediocrity. For a Yankee team desperately in search of building blocks, Roberto Kelly was becoming a frustrating liability.

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Thanks to Baseball Think Factory for the link.

A few days ago, Torii Hunter called Hideki Matsui, “The Los Angeles Godzilla of Anaheim.”

Well, done, sir.

What are you favorite baseball nicknames? I’m of the Bob Lemon School and think you should just call everyone “Meat.”

PREFACE: Writing a game recap on the Sunday of the Masters Tournament is not the easiest thing to do for a golf nut like myself. I guess that’s what DVR is for. Not knowing what I should watch sandwiched between my daughter’s naps and my wife’s grading schedule, I decided to record both. I zipped through the Yankee game first and then caught up to the goings-on at Augusta National later on. Deadlines are deadlines…

The YES telecast was odd. The pregame show featured a segment with Michael Kay and Tino Martinez venturing into the stadium and dissecting key points to the game from a couple of empty seats. This being the first YES game I’ve seen this season, I don’t know if this is a one-off experiment or a regular feature to break up the previous formula of keeping the broadcasters off camera and filling that spot with video (B-roll). If you’ve read my work here for the past three seasons, you know I like to watch the games on mute — an old habit from my days working at YESNetwork.com — so this feature was even more hilarious with Tino Martinez moving his mouth and having no sound come out. Based on the reviews, that’s not too far from what happens with the sound on.

The new graphics and layout look clean and are clearly tweaked for HD. The pitch counter is a nice addition to the bug in the upper left-hand corner. That bug has also been condensed so that it doesn’t extend across the entire top border of the screen.

The question heading into Sunday, as it seems to be every time A.J. Burnett takes the mound, is “Which guy will show up?” The first inning featured the version we’ve come to sort of expect, going back to last October: 21 pitches, two runs allowed, two hits, a walk, only one first-pitch strike to the six batters he faced. His weakness in holding runners played a factor into the two runs scored, as both Jason Bartlett and Carl Crawford stole second to set the table for the Rays’ lead. Bartlett took advantage of Burnett throwing an off-speed pitch, while Crawford just beat a bang-bang play on a pitch-out, which featured a strong throw from Jorge Posada.

Rays starter James Shields, although he may not possess the explosive stuff of Burnett — or implosive, depending on the day — does have similar foibles. Mainly, Shields is prone to falling behind early in the count and opening up innings for the opposition. The Yankees adhered to that scouting report in the second inning, when A-Rod led off with a walk and three batters later, Curtis Granderson ripped a 3-1 fastball into the right-field corner to cut the deficit to 2-1.

The meat of the order — A-Rod, Robinson Canó, Jorge Posada and Granderson — forced Shields into a similar predicament the next time around in the fourth inning. But after A-Rod led off with a double and Posada walked with one out, Granderson and Swisher stranded them both to kill the rally.

Burnett, on the other hand, found his rhythm after hiccuping his way through the first inning. He retired 10 straight batters from the point when he walked Evan Longoria in the first and B.J. Upton in the fourth. He fired first-pitch strikes to nine of those 10 hitters. Pat Burrell’s leadoff single in the fifth — the first hit allowed by Burnett since the first inning — came on a 2-0 count.

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Last Sunday I was in Albeturkey and I stopped by to watch some high school kids play.

Today, the Yanks and Rays play indoors down in Tampa. Rubber game and all. Todd Drew’s boy, AJ Burnett on the hill as the Yanks look to win the series.

Second turn for Tino Martinez in the broadcast booth today. I figure Tino–eager to please in the manner of an over-achieving high school junior–to be awful on TV. Another boring ex-jock chock full of cliches. Company Man. But with O’Neill on Friday night in the blowout, he had a few moments of insight, some self-deprecating humor. Who knows, maybe he’ll have some spark, after all.

Big shoes to fill, though. I thought Coney was a budding star and he certainly was the most entertaining, unpredictable, and candid analyst on YES. If they ever get him together with Mex Hernandez, someone’s getting arrested.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

AP Photo/Mike Carlson

You know how they always tell us that cycles are just as rare as no-hitters and should be appreciated as such?  Nonsense.  Cycles are nice, but they’re really just gimmicks.  A no-hitter, though, is history, and CC Sabathia was chasing history on Saturday afternoon against the Tampa Bay Rays.

I’m an optimist in all things, especially when it comes to no-hitters, so after CC set down his twelfth straight batter, striking out Ben Zobrist to close out the fourth inning, I started thinking seriously about it and ignoring everything else in my life in favor of the outs piling up in Tampa.  One of those things was my wife, who made the mistake of asking me a question in the bottom of the sixth inning just as Jason Bartlett smoked a line drive that looked ticketed for right field.  Our conversation went like this:

Wife: Do you think we have time to stop at the camera store?

Me: Look at Big Tex!!!

What I probably should’ve said was, “Sure, we can definitely swing by the camera shop, but did you happen to notice the play that Mark Teixeira just made there?  That ball surely looked to be a base hit, but he really showed his Gold Glove form as he laid out to snare that liner.  Jason Giambi, by the way, wouldn’t even have been able to turn his head fast enough to follow the flight of the ball.”  But that’s not what I said.

Only an inning later, we had a similar conversation:

Wife: I’m worried about Alison’s fever.  Do you think we should take her to urgent care?

Me (standing and pumping fist): A-Rod!!!!

The smarter thing would’ve been for me to take my daughter’s temperature, discuss possible treatment options, and then explain that A-Rod’s play was the type of play that every no-hitter seems to have.  B.J. Upton had smashed a one-hop liner that looked to be headed to the left field corner, but A-Rod had dived to his right, hopped nimbly to his feet, and fired across the diamond to nab the speedy Upton by a step and a half.  With only six outs to go and Sabathia looking as strong as the defense behind him, the no-hitter looked extremely possible.

The best part of all this was that the game wasn’t really in doubt, because the Yankee hitters had arrived at the park with the urgency of an innocent man accused.  Robinson Canó can’t hit with runners on base?  He came up with two outs and Teixeira on first and answered that question by launching a home run to deep right, putting the Bombers up 2-0.  Teixeira can’t hit in April?  Tex rapped out his first three hits of the season, including an RBI double in the fourth that stretched the lead to 4-0.  Brett Gardner is an offensive liability?  He faced a team-high 27 pitches, reached base all five times, drove in two, scored twice, and stole a base.  (Some might disagree, but I’d love it if Girardi would send him out there every day for a few weeks, just to see what happens.)

So by the time the Rays came up in the 8th they were already down 8-0, and the only drama revolved around Sabathia and the final six outs.  Willy Aybar led off with a grounder that ricocheted off CC’s pitching hand (gasp!) to Canó who fired to Teixeira for the first out.  Pat Burrell then lofted a fly ball to Curtis Granderson in center, and Sabathia was four outs away; alas, that was as close as he’d get.

His former Cleveland teammate Kelly Shoppach roped a clean single to left, and that was that.  Joe Girardi sprinted out of the dugout immediately, and I imagined that he must’ve spent the entire half-inning crouched in starting blocks, poised to pull Sabathia as soon as possible.  (More on that later.)  The Yankees tacked on a couple more runs in the top of the ninth and David Robertson struck out two while nailing down the final four outs to close out what was almost an historic afternoon.  Yankees 10, Rays 0.

That Shoppach single was about as disappointing as a meaningless April base hit can be.  Even before the ball had been returned to the infield, I found myself wondering about what might’ve been.  I imagined Sabathia setting down Carl Crawford with a letter-high fastball and the celebration that would ensue.  Francisco Cervelli would leap Yogi-style into Sabathia’s arms, the rest of the team would mob them, and A-Rod and Teixeira would struggle to hoist CC’s 290 pounds onto their shoulders.

Post-game interviews, however, would reveal that if Shoppach hadn’t spoiled the no-no, Girardi would have.  As dominant as the big horse had been, umpire Wally Bell’s postage stamp strike zone had helped drive Sabathia’s pitch count up to 109 heading into the Shoppach at bat.  “Watching that pitch count go up and up and up, that was what was on my mind the most.  Shoppach was his last hitter no matter what.”

Sabathia jokingly responded that Girardi would’ve had a fight on his hands had he tried to prevent him from going back out to work the ninth, and if I had been in Tampa, I would have been fighting right alongside him.

So sorry I’m late, guys. But better late than never a game thread for the Saturday Fox Game of the Week.

Grill and serve.

Through three innings, David Price was so dominant that it looked to me like he was a real threat for a no-hitter. He painted the corners with 97 mph fastballs and induced swings so late that you could hear the thud of the catcher’s mitt before you saw the barrel of the bat cross the plate.

(AP PHOTO/MIKE CARLSON)

He eventually lost a few mph on the heater as the game progressed. Alex Rodriguez and Nick Swisher got good wood on a couple of fastballs over the middle of the plate in the third and staked the Yankees a very, very brief 2-0 lead. Price quickly regrouped. He mixed in some of his other pitches and cruised into the eighth before losing the script. The Rays bullpen got the production back on track for an easy 9-3 victory.

For the first three innings, Javier Vazquez kept up his end of a potential pitching duel. He complimented an ordinary, but well-placed 89 mph fastball with impressive breaking balls and a really good looking change-up. While he clearly didn’t have the stuff of his counterpart, he looked like he would be effective for several innings. He wasn’t.

With a freshly minted lead, Vazquez walked Ben Zobrist on four pitches to lead off the bottom of the fourth. With one out and the count even at 1-1, Javy went to the gopher ball, 89 mph, perfectly located up and out over the plate… for Carlos Pena to poop on. Vazquez didn’t have much else to offer that inning, and with Marcus Thames playing left field like he was handling nuclear waste, the Rays made Javy’s assortment of previously impressive pitches look like just so much slop. Hit after hit after hit made it 5-2.

Javy’s night wasn’t done there. Somehow he was still in there in the sixth to ensure Willy Aybar’s first start of the 2010 season be a memorable one. All in all Vazquez allowed eight earned runs in five and 2/3 innings. He allowed 11 baserunners in the process of recording 17 outs. It was worse than any start in the entire 2009 season with the Braves.

When Vazquez came aboard in the winter, I anticipated a divide within the fan base. Those who put great value in advanced metrics loved the move and harbored little to no grudge for 2004. Others would just not accept the guy who etched in stone the most embarrassing choke in team sport history. I tried to come down with the smarties, but tonight, as Vazquez evaporated in the 4th, I just found myself unable to do it. I really expect nothing from this guy this year.

Anyway, as much fun as it would be to pile on Javy’s dud, the real story was Price. Cliff was all over it in the pre-game post; Wright is the key to the Rays’ season. He looks like he is ready to take a huge step forward this year. He may have dropped some weight – it was especially evident in his face. His large, sad eyes, peer out from sunken sockets under the shadow of the bill of his cap. His milk saucer ears, and long, gaunt, face with big rubber-ish features reminded me of Brad Daugherty from his UNC days.

He had his best stuff for three innings, and his b-grade issue was excellent until the eighth. He looks to be a scary opponent for a long time.

The story of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays over the last three years has been all about run prevention. In 2007, the last of their wilderness years, they allowed more runs than any team in baseball (944, 5.83 per game) and lost 96 games. That offseason they traded defensively challenged right-fielder Delmon Young for right-hander Matt Garza and slick fielding shortstop Jason Bartlett, and moved Akinori Iwamura to second base to make room for rookie Evan Longoria. Those moves, along with the mid-season acquisition of strong defensive right fielder Gabe Ross, upgraded their defense from the worst in baseball in 2007 (according to defensive efficiency) to the best in 2008, and filled a big hole in their rotation in the process. The result was that in 2008 the newly re-named Rays allowed the third fewest runs in baseball (671, 4.14 per game) and won 97 games and the American League pennant. Last year, some correction set in as the Rays fell just below the major league average by allowing 754 runs (one more than the Yankees) or 4.65 per game and finished third in the division with 84 wins.

The good news for the Rays is that, while all that was going on, their offense has developed into one of the most potent in baseball, ranking sixth in the majors with 4.96 runs scored per game last year, and there are reasons to expect a better performance from their starting rotation this year.

In 2009, Scott Kazmir and Andy Sonnanstine combined to make 38 starts for the Rays in which they posted a cumulative 6.32 ERA. This year, Kazmir is an LA Angel (and back on the DL) and Sonnanstine is being limited to long relief. Their places in the rotation have been taken by David Price, the top overall pick in the 2007 amateur draft, and Wade Davis, a third-round pick from 2004 who pitched well in a September call-up last year. I’m among those who believe that Price and Davis, both of whom are 24 this season, could be the top two arms in the Tampa rotation before long.

Price made 23 starts for the big club last year, and though he had his struggles, seven of his last 12 starts were quality, including two against the Yankees, and he went 7-3 with a 3.58 ERA over those dozen outings. There’s no doubting Price’s wicked left-handed stuff, which mixes mid-to-high 90s fastballs with sweeping curves some 20 miles per hour slower and changups and sliders, the latter being his best pitch, that split the difference.

Adding Price and Davis to Garza (26), James Shields (28), and 6-foot-9 sophomore Jeff Niemann (27) gives the Rays a strong, five-deep rotation that has the potential to compete with those of the Yankees and Red Sox despite the relative lack of star power. At the same time, Price and Davis, and to a lesser degree Niemann’s ability to follow up his strong rookie showing, are the keys to the Rays’ 2010 season.

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Zorah on the Terrace, By Henri Matisse (1912)

Since we’s in Morocco and all…

Amanda Hesser explores some recipes for a spicy organge salad, Moroccan style. Mmmm.

Malcolm McLaren, most famous for bringing us the Sex Pistols, died yesterday. He was 64.

McLaren also was the brains behind a seminial Hip Hop record in the early ’80s.

Dig the classic, Buffalo Gals:

Tonight brings the return of Javy Vazquez. Tyler Kepner has a feature on the Yankee pitcher today in the Times. I always liked rooting for Vazquez and don’t see why that should stop anytime soon.

Meanwhile, in case you hadn’t heard, umpire Joe West took some pointed shots at the Yankees and Red Sox and the operatic length of their games. Joe Girardi and Brian “Forensic Science” Cashman were mum on the topic, but Mariano Rivera was not:

“It’s incredible,” Rivera told The Post. “If he has places to go, let him do something else. What does he want us to do, swing at balls?”

…”He has a job to do. He should do his job,” Rivera said. “We don’t want to play four-hour games, but that’s what it takes. We respect and love the fans and do what we have to do, and that’s play our game.”

Three Musicians, By Pablo Picasso (1921)

The Yanks have the night off. But feel free to chat about art, baseball or the weather. Whatever’s clever, y’all.

No game today so no battle rhymes. How about happy times, like this classic remix by Pete Rock from the days when everything Pete touched turned to butta:

These are words that occur to me while watching Brett Gardner swing the bat: flick, flip, flail, fling, wisp,  slice,  slash,  stab,  slap, poke, yank, jerk, and (perhaps a case of wishful thinking) drag and bunt. Doesn’t this unique hack deserve a nickname?

I have a batting tee set up in the living room for my two young sons (one and two-and-a-half) and occasionally they paddle over and take a swipe at the ball without provocation and sans instruction. The bat we’ve got is a little too hefty for the one year old to manage on his own, so he turns it around, holds the barrel, and addresses the ball with the handle. He doesn’t blast the ball off the windows, but he makes contact. 

Brett Gardner has never gone up holding the wrong end of the bat (though in his debut season, he had considerable difficulty holding onto the right end – I personally saw him chuck the bat on a swing and miss three times in two games), but he has taken a similar approach to hitting. He has developed a convoluted swing that allows him to make consistent contact against Major League quality pitching. This is no small feat, but the result is not pleasing to watch. In his brief time in the Majors, I have developed a strong negative opinion of him as a player because of this swing and the often meager results. I’ve never looked forward to watching his at bats.

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From the vaults, dig this classic 2006 Harper’s magazine article by Frederick Kaufman, Debbie Does Salad: The Food Network at the Frontiers of Pornography.

Couple of good pieces on the nature of fame this week in Sports Illustrated. First, from Charles Pierce’s profile of Phoniex Suns point guard, Steve Nash (and what a pleasure it is to see Pierce back in the pages of SI):

His globalized upbringing and the cosmopolitan view of the world that it developed in him have given Nash a firm sense of who he is and, with it, the freedom to explore all the aspects of who he is. It armored him against the way that celebrity can be isolating. It gave him ways out of the bubble. He was a globalized man before the NBA became a globalized product, and that has made all the difference. It made him free to run around in his bachelor days with Dirk Nowitzki, when they were both young and Mavs together, just as he is free today to bring his family to New York City for the summer, and to play in his soccer games and drink beer with his teammates afterward. It has enabled him to avoid being “authentic” by remaining genuine.

“Sometimes,” he says, “it takes a lot of dusting off to say, ‘Where am I? What am I doing?’ because it’s such an all-encompassing pursuit. It’s such a marathon, whether it’s a season or a career, that you can easily lose track of what’s taking place. A little bit of you, I think, disappears every day. You’re city to city, and you’re in such a routine and it takes so much to get through it that you just kind of get numb to it and, in the process, you lose a certain amount of consciousness of what you’re actually experiencing, every day. You don’t see anything anymore.”

Also, be sure and check out S.L. Price’s excellent profile of Tiger Woods:

“One thing Tiger’s not is vulnerable,” says John Daly. “It could be worse for us, I think. I think he’s going to come out and just kick everybody’s ass.”

Woods knows that only winning can begin to dilute the sewage surrounding his name. Playing, though, will be the easy part. Tiger has never shown much ability to laugh at himself, and he is now a global joke. It’s unclear how, aura dissolved, he’ll react to the thousands of faces staring, to the once-ignored crowd that now knows him, in a twisted way, better than his wife ever did.

After 15 years in the cultural firmament Woods has become three-dimensional at last: The crash and the stint in therapy, his February statement of remorse and his self-immolating critiques revealed a champion at war with himself. To have him detonate the biggest public-relations bomb in the history of sports feels almost tragic, until you recall that his marriage and career still draw breath. Nothing died but an image.

The Masters starts today.

There are few filmmakers that have enjoyed the kind of run that Preston Sturges had during World War II when he made seven stellar movies in four years, including The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Mogran’s Creek, and Sullivan’s Travels. He was never the same after that, and maybe it’s greedy of us to expect much more from one man. In the current issue of Vanity Fair, Douglas McGrath examines Sturges’ brilliant streak:

Whatever combination of alchemy, talent, and luck had existed to make those years so fruitful, the next 16 would be a series of humiliating setbacks. His public fell off and the critics found valleys where once they’d seen only peaks. His confidence was shaken. And a style like his cannot survive self-doubt: the success of the work is tied to his ability to sustain a tone, so much trickier than merely sustaining a plot.

And sustaining a tone was difficult for him even at the top of his game. It must be said that even the seven wonders of the Sturges canon have their problems, and the problems can always be traced to an instability of tone. Not one of these movies is a perfect picture, the way The Shop Around the Corner is perfect, or The Wizard of Oz or Zelig or The Godfather is perfect. Each of those films clears its throat and sings its song, and there is never a moment when you tilt your head and wonder, What was that?

But there is always that moment in a Sturges movie. It comes when the champagne of his dialogue is flattened by the pneumonia of his slapstick.

Sometimes his slapstick doesn’t work because of poor execution or a lack of convincing motivation (Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake and then the butlers falling into the pool in Sullivan’s Travels). Sometimes the heavy-handed way he frames and shoots these sequences, often at odds with his otherwise flowing and graceful photography, kills the fun. Other times, our laughter dies from a sense that the slapstick isn’t true: there are times when someone falls too fast, as if the film is sped up (Henry Fonda going over the couch in The Lady Eve). His slapstick lacks the loopy inevitability of Lucy’s getting drunk on Vitameatavegamin or the hypnotizingly hilarious boxing match in City Lights.

A fact worth repeating: he made seven films in four years. Perhaps the race to get them done explains the sometimes jarring tonal shifts. One wonders, had he spent a little more time on each film, if they might have achieved a more balanced and integrated tone. And yet, who knows if it wasn’t the speed with which the films were made that infused them with their appealing pep and lack of pretension? God knows, I’d rather see The Lady Eve twice than Vincente Minnelli’s labored The Pirate once.