Daily Archives: June 28, 2010

The Yanks have the night off, but MLB’s new shining star, Stephen Strasburg is on the hill tonight and the game will be televised on ESPN2.

Here’s an open thread for whatever you find clever…

[Photo Credit: Darrellh200]

Sticking with comic book artists again this week, let’s go spanning the globe.

First, up, the legendary Herge:

Since it is hotter n July today, why not check out a scene from this classic NYC summer flick:

I remember seeing this on opening day near Times Square (my friends and I were the only white kids is the audience). I’ll never forget how we were introduced to Rosie Perez, shadow-boxing of sorts over P.E. Man, the movie, and that theater were charged–hyped, as they used to say.

I don’t think Do the Right Thing is a great movie, but it’s as close as Spike has gotten and I think it is his best, even though it is deeply flawed. It is funny as hell, Ernest Dickerson’s photography is weird and evocative, and Spike really captured a moment in time. When this movie dropped, he was hottest thing in town.

Is Ted Berg the new Ted Baxter?

And is Johnny Damon a rootin’, tootin’, pop-gun shootin’ chickenhawk?

On Saturday morning, our downstairs neighbor rang the doorbell. She just finished her sophomore year of high school. Her mother died of ALS this spring. She’s off with her father to travel around the country this summer. When they return they’ll  move to another, more affordable apartment. She brought us a bag filled with booze as a gift because “my dad doesn’t drink anymore.”

We don’t either but still we accepted the liquor and wished her a happy summer. You’d never tell by talking with her that her mother just died. We’ll miss them not being in the building but told her to stop by anytime.

So I had ALS on my mind and I wanted to share with you the story of Tom Judt. He is an accomplished historian who has ALS and has been writing wonderful, short essays for The New York Review of Books. Here is his latest, on words:

In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell castigated contemporaries for using language to mystify rather than inform. His critique was directed at bad faith: people wrote poorly because they were trying to say something unclear or else deliberately prevaricating. Our problem, it seems to me, is different. Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion…”). Rather than suffering from the onset of “newspeak,” we risk the rise of “nospeak.”

I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past. In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. They still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughts—the view from inside is as rich as ever—but I can no longer convey them with ease. Vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate even to my close collaborator. The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.

Though I am now more sympathetic to those constrained to silence I remain contemptuous of garbled language. No longer free to exercise it myself, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right—and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.

There was a good, long profile on Judt by Wesley Yang  in New York Magazine earlier this year. Check it out.

[Photo Credit: Steve Pyke for the Chronicle Review]

Cool like a cucumber, that’s how we roll in the summertime.

There’s all sorts of ways to flip cucumbers (here’s a recipe for the salad picture above). When I used to wait tables the Amigos in the kitchen would slice cucumbers and sprinkle salt and chili powder on them, followed by a squeeze of lemon. It’d be a macho thing to see how much chili powder you could stand.

I usually have ’em plain with some kosher salt.

As Cliff noted in his recap of Saturday’s loss, A.J. Burnett has been lit up recently.  Burnett has basically gone 0-for-June, amassing an 0-5 record featuring a slash stat line of .357/.455/.724.  In his first 11 starts of 2010, Burnett pitched to a 1.08 GB rate with 15% line drives.  The last five starts, those numbers are 0.63 and 22% respectively.

But I’m not here to opine on what ails A.J. (It can’t be as simple as not being able to find an Eiland on a map, can it?).  I’m just here to have fun with numbers (and avoid doing my laundry on this beastly hot day).

This is the third time in Burnett’s career, and the first time since 2005, that he’s had five consecutive starts with Game Scores no higher than 50*.  Now, to be fair, the prior two occasions each featured ERAs of 7.40 with only two homers allowed, while this fivesome is festooned with nine homers surrendered and an 11.35 ERA.  So, this is a whole ‘nother level of ugly.

The franchise record for longest streak of starts with game scores no higher than 50 is held by two Jeffs, current Dodger Jeff Weaver, and historical after-thought Jeff Johnson.  Weaver had 11 straight subpar starts from April to June of 2003, while Johnson’s rookie campaign of 1991 featured a Summer-full of bad pitching (July to September).

If you page down that list, you’ll note that the last Yankee to have five or more straight starts like this was Javier Vazquez, who managed to begin his second tour of duty with the Yanks as he ended his first one, getting hammered.  Vazquez’s streak of eight starts was preceded chronologically by some equally frustrating stretches by the likes of  Joba Chamberlain, Sergio Mitre, Chien-Ming Wang (though we might give Wang a pass due to injury), Carl Pavano (here we might NOT give Pavano a pass due to injury) and Sidney Ponson.

Now clearly, Burnett has enough of a track record to make one think he’ll snap out of it after pitching well enough for the majority of his first 1+ seasons with the Yanks.  The question now becomes, will Girardi let Burnett pitch himself back to normalcy without a bullpen stop?  It should be interesting what the return of Dave Eiland does for A.J.’s fortunes.

* - 50 is the baseline score used for assessing starting pitcher's
outings, as developed by Bill James.

BJ Upton and Evan Longoria screamed at each other yesterday in the Ray’s dugout. The Rays are a frustrated team at the moment. Jonah Keri, who is writing a book on the organization, offers 10 Things the Rays should do to compete for the Whirled Serious.

Sunday night’s rubber game between the Yankees and Dodgers didn’t deliver on its promise as a pitchers duel. Dodgers lefty Clayton Kershaw was nails, but Andy Pettitte made two throwing errors on bunts in the third, putting the Yankees in an 3-0 hole, then coughed up two more runs in the fourth, the latter on a Ronnie Belliard solo homer, to put the Yanks down 5-0.

Kershaw, meanwhile, allowed just three baserunners through five innings, those coming on a Derek Jeter leadoff single, a pitch that hit Brett Gardner in the wrist, and a single by Gardner’s replacement, Chad Huffman (Gardner will see the team doctor on Monday). Jeter singled again to lead of the sixth, but Kershaw struck out Nick Swisher, and Casey Blake made a nice play on a hard grounder to his right by Mark Teixeira to force Jeter at second. That brought up Alex Rodriguez with two out. Rodriguez worked the count full, then turned on an inside fastball, sending it over the “Mannywood” sign in left for a two-run home run, his third jack in the last five games, to bring the Yankees within 5-2.

The Dodgers added an insurance run against Joba Chamberlain in the eighth, handing a 6-2 lead to their dominant closer, Jonathon Broxton, in the ninth. Broxton entered the game with some ridiculous numbers, including a 0.83 ERA, 13.2 K/9, and 9.60 K/B, and had allowed just one earned run in his previous 23 appearance, including 1 1/3 hitless innings against the Yankees on Saturday.

The Ox started his night by striking out Teixeira on four pitches, but Rodriguez singled on his fifth. Alex took second on defensive indifference on the first pitch to Robinson Cano, and when Cano connected for a double to right, Rodriguez scored to make it 6-3 Dodgers.

That brought up Jorge Posada, who quickly fell into a 0-2 hole, then battled Broxton for seven more pitches, working the count full before singling to right to bring the tying run to the plate. Following Posada’s nine-pitch battle, Curtis Granderson worked Broxton over for an eight-pitch walk, putting the tying run on base and loading the bases for . . . Chad Huffman?

With Brett Gardner knocked out of the game and no designated hitter, the Yankees’ rally came down to Chad Huffman and Colin Curtis, who had gone in for Nick Swisher as part of a double-switch, a pair of rookies who to that point in their major league careers had combined for three hits and three walks in 15 plate appearances. Joe Girardi’s bench at that point consisted of Francisco Cervelli, the backup catcher, and Ramiro Peña. On the mound stood the 300-pound Broxton, one of the game’s most dominating closers. It hurt to watch.

Until Huffman singled to right on a 1-1 pitch, scoring Cano and Posada and pushing Granderson to third. Suddenly all Curtis had to do was deliver a productive out with a speedy runner at third to tie the game. Curtis fell into a quick 0-2 hole, but then took three balls, one of which looked like strike three at the knees, and one of which, a slider in the dirt, almost tied the game on its own. With the count full, Curtis fouled off four pitches. Then, on the tenth pitch of his at-bat and Broxton’s 40th of the inning, he hit a hard grounder to James Loney at first base.

With two outs, Huffman on first, and Granderson on third as the potential tying run, Loney had two choices. He could either throw home to prevent the run, allowing the inning to continue, or he could throw to second in the hope of turning a game-ending double play. Loney chose neither of those options, instead trying to accomplish both at once by scrambling over to force out Curtis at first, then firing home to get Granderson. Only Loney’s throw tailed away from the runner and the time it took him to get the force was enough to allow Granderson so slide in clearly ahead of Russell Martin’s tag with the game-tying run.

From there, the Dodgers lost their cool as both Garret Anderson (who entered the game in the ninth as a defensive replacement for Manny Ramirez) and Martin got ejected for arguing over called strikes that were indeed strikes, while the Yankees made it look easy. Mariano Rivera worked a 1-2-3 bottom of the ninth around Anderson’s ejection. Robinson Cano responded to Joe Torre’s decision to bring in lefty George Sherrill to face him in the top of the tenth by launching a two-run home run to left center, and Rivera worked around an infield single and Martin’s ejection to nail down the 8-6 win in the bottom of the tenth.

Meanwhile, the ESPN camera’s lingered on Joe Torre, who had the look of a man watching his ex-wife make out with an underwear model. Torre said before the game that he was looking forward to putting this much-hyped and emotionally charged series behind him. I don’t imagine that was ever more true than when he was watching Mariano Rivera nail down a comeback win against him for the first time.