Monthly Archives: August 2010

It’s gunna be a slow day, bloggin’ at the Banter. So here’s some stuff to look at…

Flix by Bags.

The Rays have pulled even with the Yanks in first place in the AL East. It was a long, clammy night in the Bronx. AJ Burnett looked okay through the first four innings. Then it all went to hell in the fifth and when the dust cleared Burnett was headed to the showers and the Jays had eight runs on the board.

The Yanks were not out of it, though; two-run homers by Nick Swisher and Mark Teixiera, kept them alive. Derek Jeter had a couple of hits, and Lance Berkman collected his first RBI in pinstripes. But pinch-hitter Austin Kearns, representing the tying run, struck-out looking to end the eighth. Swisher hit a long solo homer in the ninth and Alex Rodriguez came up for the fifth time, now truly swallowed-up in a slump (soft ground balls, swinging through pitches). He grounded out to end the game and you could hear some fans groan.

The Yankees’ bullpen was good but the offense didn’t have enough to survive Burnett.

Yeah, not a happy night.

Final Score: Jays 8, Yanks 6.

[Photo Credit: Kathy Willens/AP]

I have to be honest, I just can’t figure the Blue Jays this year. It’s not just that I expected them to be a poor rebuilding team yet they haven’t been more than a game under .500 all season. It’s not just that they’ve had a confluence of career and comeback seasons, most of them boosted by the long ball (29-year-old Jose Bautista: 32 HR; 31-year-old Vernon Wells: 20 HR; 33-year-old Alex Gonzalez: 17 HR; 29-year-old John Buck: 14 HR). Now that the trading deadline has passed, I can’t figure out why the Jays did so little.

The Jays made a solid deal in mid-July, flipping Gonzalez to the Braves for 27-year-old Cuban shortstop Yunel Escobar, who had fallen out of favor in Atlanta, but has already rebounded nicely in Toronto, hitting .323/.344/.500 in 14 games (with three homers, of course). Escobar, a solidly above-average offensive shortstop who won’t hurt you in the field, will be arbitration eligible this winter, but won’t have much of a case given his .238/.334/.284 performance for the Braves, and will then remain under team control for the next three years.

Kudos to general manager Alex Anthopoulos for that one, but I can’t figure out why Bautista, Buck, Lyle Overbay, Jason Frasor, Shawn Camp, and especially Scott Downs are still Blue Jays. I’m going to go out on a very short limb and say that Bautista will never have a more productive season than he’s having now and will not be on the next Blue Jays playoff team. Given his performance this season, he’s due for a huge arbitration raise, and his trade value will never be higher than it was on Saturday. Buck, Overbay, Frasor, and Downs are all free agents this winter and should have been cashed in. Perhaps there was no market for the first three, but Downs was highly sought after. As his predecessor J.P. Ricciardi did with a much bigger chip at last year’s deadline, Anthopoulos set his price too high and refused to budge. In the case of Roy Halladay, the Jays still owned him for another season and after Ricciardi was fired, Anthopoulos was able to get a solid return for him (though he frittered away part of it, turning impressive prospect Michael Taylor into marginal one Anthony Gose via two subsequent moves). Downs, however, will now provide the Jays no long-term benefit.

So the Jays are left to click along as just-above-.500 team in a division in which a .600 winning percentage is typically required for a second place/Wild Card finish. I don’t get it.

The twist for the Yankees this week is that the Jays, having held onto all of their major league trade chips, remain a solid team worth taking seriously. Tonight, the Yankees and A.J. Burnett face Brandon Morrow, one of Anthopoulos’s better additions, who has begun to find some consistency after having finally been left alone in the rotation. He leads the major leagues in strikeouts per nine innings with an even ten and enters tonight’s game coming off two quality starts, although both came against the Orioles. The knock on Morrow at the moment is that he seems to thrive against bad teams and struggle against good ones, though that pattern isn’t consistent. The Yankees have already faced Morrow twice this season. He dominated them in Toronto on June 6 (7 IP, 4 H, 1 R, 1 BB, 8 K), but struggled in a rematch in the Bronx (6 IP, 9 H, 5 R, albeit with just one walk and seven Ks).

Burnett enters this game having not allowed a run in 11 1/3 innings over two starts since cutting his hand in a clubhouse temper tantrum and having to leave his previous start in the third inning. Burnett has faced his former team twice this season, inverting Morrow’s results (or echoing them, depending on your perspective) by pitching poorly in Toronto and well in the Bronx, throwing 6 2/3 shutout innings against the Jays at home on July 2.

Nick Swisher returns to the two-hole tonight, Mark Teixeira returns to first base, and Alex Rodriguez returns to the lineup. Jorge Posada is catching and batting sixth ahead of Fat Elvis. Quothe Berkman, “I don’t know if I’ve ever hit seventh. I’ve hit sixth before, I know that. But I also can’t remember the last time that I’ve been on a team with like eight Hall of Famers. That has a lot to do with it.” Future Hall of Famers Curtis Granderson and Brett Gardner fill the last two spots

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Balsamic Strawberry Jam.

Yes, please.

From the Savory Sweet Life (thanks to Saveur for the link).

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Happy birthday to one of the true heavyweights of stage and screen – Peter O’Toole turns 78 today.  O’Toole is not only an exceptional actor, he’s also a true “star” in a way we rarely see anymore. He may have been riffing on Errol Flynn in his brilliant performance in My Favorite Year, but it was clear there was more than a little of himself in Alan Swann too.

O’Toole’s sometimes boozy, seemingly always cheerful, outsized personality and his talk show appearances are as legendary as his performances (remember him riding a camel onto the stage for David Letterman?). Nominated 8 times for the Best Actor Oscar, he’s never won, but did accept an honorary Academy Award for his body of work (which he initially refused). Here’s a snippet from one of those nominated performances, as movie director Eli Cross in Richard Rush’s 1980 film The Stunt Man:

Since attempting to watch Lawrence of Arabia at work seems like a bad idea, and its too early to raise a pint to the old Irishman, why not mark the occasion by reading Gay Talese’s terrific 1963 Esquire profile of O’Toole.

O'Toole and Richard Burton in Becket (1964)

Happy birthday, Peter. Let’s hope we see you up on the silver screen again soon.

Guilty Pleasure Movie Week

Take one cast full of megastars with numerous memorable roles already in their respective portfolios, add in a few great character actors, embellish with the adrenalin, in-your-face, highly-stylized mayhem of producer Jerry Bruckheimer, mix liberally with the talents of a first-time movie director whose resume had most recently included Budweiser commercials with dancing ants, and what do you get? Only one of the biggest hits of 1997, the critically-panned but commercially-successful “Con Air“.

Con Air tells the story of Cameron Poe* (Nicolas Cage, working with Bruckheimer for the second straight movie after the similarly-styled “The Rock“).  Poe is a former U.S. Army Ranger, so you know he has all sorts of combat training (and, it turns out, one poorly executed supposedly Southern accent by Cage).  He arrives home after fighting in Desert Storm and being honorably discharged from the military. However, on the night he returns, he is assaulted by three drunkards while escorting his pregnant wife (Monica Potter) home from the bar where she was waiting for him (Note to wife: second-hand smoke isn’t good for you or your unborn child, and if your hubby is coming home from the war, is the bar really the nicest place you can think to meet him?).

* "Cameron Poe" anagrams to such phrases as "poor menace",
"peace moron" and "No rape! Come!".  Strangely, all of these
seem to fit the character at various stages of the movie.

Poe defends her by using his special ops skills, and subsequently kills one of his attackers. On advice from his attorney, he pleads guilty to first-degree manslaughter, expecting leniency from the court due to his military service. However, the judge sentences Poe to 7–10 years in a maximum-security Federal penitentiary, because his special ops training makes him a deadly weapon.  Uh yeah, OK . . . but no way would that have happened had that character been played by Steven Seagal.  Anyway, I would have paid to see Poe inflict his training on his lawyer afterwards.

Poe keeps his nose clean in jail and ends up getting paroled eight years later.  He is to be flown back on the “Jailbird,” a C-123 airplane, along with several other prisoners that are being transferred to a new super-duper-maximum security prison.

Now here I must admit a bit of a bias in my choice for a guilty pleasure movie, as my current employer at one time did in fact fly inmates upstate.  And I can tell you beyond a reasonable doubt that no parolee would EVER get released this way.  But let’s not let that detract from the story, shall we?

Meanwhile, DEA agent Duncan Malloy (Colm Meaney, playing against his usual mild-mannered type from the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” TV series) approaches U.S. Marshal in charge of the transfer, Vince Larkin (the always enjoyable John Cusack), and requests he slip an undercover agent on board to coax information out of a drug lord during the flight. Larkin reluctantly agrees on the condition the agent doesn’t carry a weapon, but Malloy manages to slip a gun to the agent before boarding.  (Silly DEA agent!  Don’t you know guns, mean convicts and pressurized aircraft don’t mix?)

Wouldn’t you know it . . . shortly after takeoff, the prisoners launch what turns out to have been a carefully-planned and scripted coup led by Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom (John Malkovich, in a restrained, cool, and understatedly convincing role) and overpower the guards, taking control of the plane; when the DEA agent tries to take control of the situation by brandishing his now-not-sneaked-on-anymore gun, he is quickly killed by Grissom. Poe opts to keep his “secretly a good guy just trying to get home to his ‘hummingbird'” identity quiet (yes, that’s Poe’s pet name for his wife . . . hummingbird) and cooperates with Grissom, who promises all prisoners that they will be flown to a non-extradition country thanks to the drug overlord, if they help out.

The plane lands as scheduled to make prisoner transfers; Grissom and his crew pose as guards and take advantage of a dust storm to make sure the transfer appears to go smoothly, acquiring reinforcements such as a pilot known as Swamp Thing (veteran character actor M.C. Gainey) and Garland Greene (a droll Hannibal Lecter-like psychopath with a keen sense of humor, played by a scene-stealing Steve Buscemi).

Meanwhile, Joe “Pinball” Parker (played by a then-unknown David (not Dave) Chappelle) sneaks the Jailbird’s original transponder onto a private tour plane, leading the authorities astray. Although Poe secretly manages to get word out on the hijacking, it is too late to stop the plane from taking off.

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Wait, it’s Monday isn’t it? Dag, I’s still feelin’ lazy.

I’ll never get that cornmeal made.

I had never heard James Shields reffered to as “Big Game James” prior to this afternoon, but the Rays starter didn’t give me any opportunity to snicker at it. Shields handily  outdueled C.C. Sabathia and led the Rays to a clean 3-0 win, and bringing them to within a game of the AL East lead. Sometimes I miss the Devil Rays of my youth.

The Yankees weren’t lifeless, but they only managed to scrape together 5 hits and, tellingly, one walk against Shields, while Sabathia was solid but not at his best – and it would’ve taken his best to compete against Shields, whose changeup baffled most of the Yanks all afternoon. New York wasn’t helped by Girardi’s odd choice to start Lance Berkman at first base over Mark Texeira, and the defensive downgrade cost the Yanks at several points, but given Shields’ great game it probably didn’t matter in the end. Meanwhile, Alex Rodriguez sat out today, to give him a mental and physical break, but I can’t really quibble with that call. And he made a dramatic pinch-hit appearance in the 7th… believe me, if he’d hit one out, you’d have heard about it. So that storyline continues, god help us, but at least Lance Berkman’s 0-for-his-Yankee-career slide ended a day after it began, with a sixth-inning single.

Sabathia chugged along steadily into the 7th inning, but after he climbed over 100 pitches Girardi pulled him for Newest Yankee Kerry Wood – who made a good first impression by striking out Evan Longoria with a nasty little curveball. I really hope one day I’ll be able to look at Wood and see a reliever with good stuff instead of a symbol of sky-high expectations unfulfilled, but I think it’s going to take a while. In the 8th Wood got two outs (thanks in part to Jason Bartlett’s bunting strikeout, which I imagine has to be one of the worst feelings in baseball) but also loaded the bases, and was replaced by… Chad Gaudin? A baffling decision in a pretty close game, if you ask me, which nobody did. But he struck out Reid Brignac, so no harm no foul, I suppose.

Shields came out after recording one out in the 8th, and was replaced by Chad Qualls; but even against Qualls, the bane of many a fantasy team this year (to say nothing of the actual Diamondbacks), the Yankees couldn’t do a thing. Lance Berkman grounded into a double play, and Qualls lowered his ERA to a shiny 8.15. It’s tough dropping a series to the team breathing down your neck in a division race, but the Rays are a very good team and the games were close- plus there’s a bit of breathing room in the Wild Card race – so there’s no reason for alarm. Still, if the Rays don’t scare you this year, you haven’t been paying attention.

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* I of course had, however, heard Lance Berkman referred to as “Big Puma,” which prompted me to head for baseball-reference.com and look up all the Major Leaguers who’ve had “Big” nicknames. It’s quite a list. By my count there have been no less than 17 players nicknamed Big Bill, and 18 Big Eds. In addition to the well-known Big Train, Big Unit, Big Mac, Big Papi, Big Hurt, Big Poison, and both Big Cats, there’s been Big Six, Big Bow, Big Donkey, Big Daddy, The Big Bear, Big Murph, Big Country, and more, including Big Ebbie, who also, to my delight, was known as “Steam Engine in Boots.” You’re welcome.

Wouldn’t you be?

I think this says it all:

“I was thinking about that on the way over here — I’m coming to play for the New York Yankees against the Tampa Bay Rays, basically for first place in the division in August, or I’d be going up to play the Milwaukee Brewers, and there are like 10 people in the stands,” said Berkman, who will wear No. 17. He added, “When you’re a veteran — I’m 34, which isn’t necessarily ancient, but definitely getting toward more yesterdays than tomorrow in the game — you start to see the window for an opportunity to win and feel the rush of the playoffs close.”
(Ben Shpigel, N.Y. Times)

The heat broke in New York. Yesterday, it was sunny but clear. This morning, it’s overcast, no humidity, with a breeze. We could all use a break. ‘Nother win this afternoon sure would be nice too.

[Photo Credit: Mike Carlson/AP]