Monthly Archives: August 2010

Josh Wilker on Tommy Lasorda and Mickey Rivers.

On Rivers…

The other night ESPN Classic replayed the game that got Rivers and the Yankees to the first of the three straight World Series: the fifth game of the 1976 American League championship series with the Royals. Before the famed riot-sparking home run by Chris Chambliss in the bottom of the ninth, Rivers keyed an early rally by slapping a base hit into centerfield. I’d forgotten how unusual Rivers looked and moved.

“What’s wrong with him?” my wife asked.

We were watching him strut-limp back to first after rounding the bag. He seemed like he’d been assembled in a rush from spare parts, long bow legs springing from a tiny torso, a weird jaunty lean to his body, as if he was suffering from a running cramp. His mouth was motoring.

“He’s a character,” was all I could say to my wife by way of explanation.

One of the Banter crew, Williamny23, has started his own site, The Captain’s Blog.

Go check it out. He’s got some good stuff up there and he’s only just begun.

When I finished reading the Daily News this morning on my way to work, I kept busy thinking about my day, and looked at a kid sitting across from me, music bleeding out of his cheesy earphones. The 1 train was creeping, not zipping along, starting at 191st street. When the train limped  into the 157th street station I noticed a heavyset female police officer in our car and fantasized about her taking out the kid with the loud music.

Then I saw  a crowd of people on the uptown platform. When our train stopped and opened its doors, the officer spoke into her walkie-talkie and stepped off the train. I looked out of the window again and saw a young man, shirtless, sitting on the uptown platform, his legs dangling over the tracks. The crowd gave him plenty of room. An uptown train was stopped about fifty feet away from him. The man had a hard look on his face and he looked straight ahead or down, I couldn’t figure out which.

A woman next to me turned to her companion and raised her hand, indicating that the man was drunk. Maybe he was, or just stoned or maybe crazy. Most of the people in my car stood up to see what it was all about. Then, they returned to their seats, exchanged glances with a neighbor and went back to their book or the paper or thier music and texting.

Once our train left the station it started to move quickly again. I forgot about the annoying kid and his music and thought about the guy on the track.

Well, that’s one way to limit Phil Hughes’ innings.

Like lions attacking a herd of wildebeests (or whatever it is that lions attack herds of), the Blue Jays have spent this series picking off the Yankees’ young – first Ivan Nova, who was good but not quite good enough to escape two nights ago, and now Phil Hughes, who was less good. The Yankees were behind the entire game and lost 6-3 but, thanks to the Angels’ 12-3 thrashing of the Rays, remain in a tie atop the AL East.

There’s been much discussion of Hughes’ unspecified innings limit recently, and so it would, in a sense, be nice that he pitched less than four innings tonight – except that he threw 106 pitches in those three and two thirds innings, his shortest outing of the year. They were fairly high stress, and definitely frustrating, as over and over again he got a batter to two strikes before eventually allowing a hit. According to Girardi after the game,  3.2 innings is still just 3.2 innings, but that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Neither does bringing in Javy Vazquez in relief – it would, except I thought the whole issue was he had a dead arm and needed rest, and I don’t see how pitching 4.1 innings on short notice is going to enliven said arm. I assume the Yankee trainers know more about this than I do, so probably it’s fine… but then again with an off-day tomorrow, why push your luck? The Yankees don’t necessarily need Hughes and Vazquez at their best to have some postseason success this year, but it’s hard to see them getting far without at least one of them. Anyway, the good news is Vazquez pitched well (maybe his arm is only mostly dead?), allowing just one run, on an Aaron Hill homer, and finishing out the game.

Meanwhile, Jays starter Brett Cecil is not this good – at least, not against any other team. As the guys at River Ave Blues point out, he’s now got a 1.64 ERA against the Yanks, and a 4.21 ERA against non-Yankees. Whether that’s because he’s doing something particularly effective against the Bombers, or an accident of small sample size, I can’t really say, but in any case he was effective again tonight, allowing seven hits and two walks, but limiting the damage to two runs over eight innings. The Yankees got two runs in the fourth, when Robinson Cano doubled and Marcus Thames, batting right behind him, homered; they tacked on one more in the ninth, when Eduardo Nunez singled home Austin Kearns. It was a short-lived rally, and the Yankees head into their needed off-day still perched on top of the standings, but a bit battered- Nick Swisher’s knee is hurting now, hence his absence from tonight’s lineup.

The Yankees still have two series to play against the Blue Jays, one home and one, the last of the season, back in Toronto. So you haven’t seen the last of these guys. Presumably the Yankees and their coaches will be watching a lot of Brett Cecil video between now and then.

Yanks hope to have their way with the Jays tonight in Toronto and take this series.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

More Rothko…

Christopher Walken: scene-stealer.

In fact, this scene might be the best in the entire movie, which isn’t nearly as engaging as the original BBC mini-series, but is interesting just the same:

No small thanks go to our man, Ted Berg:

Simple pleasures are the best. Brown butter and sage: a good combination:

Thanks to Technicolor Kitchen for the inspiration.

Silly, dated, but still slammin’.

And this one’s got a Mickey Mantle reference…

David Kindred has a new book about the Washington Post. It got a favorable review last weekend in the New York Times Book Review:

Kindred still lives near Washington and has maintained friendships with a number of Post reporters. He was granted permission to write this book by Leonard Downie Jr., The Post’s executive editor from 1991 to 2008, over mild objections from the corporate chairman, Donald E. Graham. (“It takes just one person saying something stupid to hurt you,” Graham tells Kindred.) Graham needn’t have worried. While pulling no punches in detailing at least one scandal involving a plan to sell access to government officials and journalists at exclusive “salons,” not to mention a notorious newsroom fistfight and the pain of “managing decline,” Kindred makes no attempt to disguise that the team he’s rooting for plays home games at 1150 15th Street NW. “Morning Miracle” may be the best semi-insider’s account we’ll get about a newspaper’s losing season of red ink, cutbacks and institutional angst amid the current industry crisis. This loser, it should be noted, won 11 Pulitzers for work done during the period Kindred is writing about, 2007 through 2009.

…Kindred is a connoisseur of journalists’ voices, exquisitely attuned to the trouble they’re in, but carrying on while they still can. Some of the best writing here is a powerful implicit argument for the irreducible value of sophisticated and fearless accountability reporting. His chronicle of how Dana Priest and Anne Hull meticulously pursue their investigation of the disgraceful treatment of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, from the first nebulous lead to the final stages of nailing a multipart exposé, is superb. The war correspondent Anthony Shadid (now with The New York Times), the feature writer Gene Weingarten and the Post team that covered the mass shooting at Virginia Tech provide further examples of exemplary work. Kindred’s portrait of The Post’s 2008 presidential election coverage is a love song to everyone from the headline writers and the front-page designer to the Pakistani immigrant who delivers the paper at dawn in the Virginia suburbs.

Kudos to Mr. Kindred. This one sounds interesting…Here’s an excerpt.

Tim Marchman on the aging Derek Jeter.

It seems like Johnny Damon will stay with the Tigers. Up in Boston, Dan Shaughnessy doesn’t understand why.

We’ve been away for much of the past two weeks — Seattle, Portland, and Palm Springs, in case you’re interested — and whenever I get away from the day-to-day and hour-to-hour kvetching about the Yankees, I find that the new perspective does me a world of good.  In Seattle I stayed with a college friend and met his seven-year-old son who loves — get this! — the Mariners.  A quick glance at the paper told me that the Mariners had lost almost 70 games, and there at the top of the American League’s Eastern Division, with the best record in baseball, sat the New York Yankees.  Suddenly I was less worried about Javy Vazquez’s dead arm, Joe Girardi’s managerial quirks, and Alex Rodríguez’s power outage.  I’m not saying you shouldn’t be worried, nor am I saying that I won’t be worried about all those things tomorrow, I’m just saying.

Tuesday night’s game against the Toronto Blue Jays, a bottom-dwelling team that’s given the Yanks fits all year long, was the first game I’d watched end to end in quite a while, and it was a great way to get back in the swing of things.  The Score Truck started rolling early, modestly at first with a run in the first (courtesy of Mark Teixeira’s 90th RBI) and another in the second when Eduardo Nuñez beat out a would-be 4-6-3, allowing Jorge Posada to score, but then things started really heating up.  Toronto lefty Marc Rzepczynski (somewhere, Diane Firstman is smiling) was walking a fine edge in the first two innings; he’d fall off in the third.  (And by the way, you know that old probability bit that says if you put a hundred monkeys into a room with a hundred typewriters, you’d eventually get “Romeo and Juliet” if given enough time?  I think if you give one typewriter to one monkey and put him in a closet for thirty seconds, you’d probably get “Rzepczynski”.)

With one out in the third, Teixeira launched a shot to left that warranted no more than a courtesy glance from left fielder Travis Snider.  Robinson Canó walked, and then Marcus Thames launched a shot to left that warranted no more than a courtesy glance from left fielder Travis Snider.  Next up, Jorge Posada launched a shot to left that warranted… you get the idea.

It was 6-0 at that point, but the Score Truckers weren’t finished — Curtis Granderson added a three-run blast in the fifth, and two batters later Derek Jeter homered, his tenth of the year, but his first hit over the fence since way back on June 12th.  Another run would score in the sixth, bringing the total to eleven, and that was enough.

The beneficiary of all this was my friend Dustin Moseley.  He skipped through the first three innings, and when he finally saw some trouble in the fourth, allowing a run by giving up a walk and two singles to open the frame, he minimized the damage by setting down the next three hitters.  He gave up another run in the sixth on a bases-loaded single by John Buck, but this time it was Granderson who minimized the damage as he threw out Adam Lind at the plate to end the inning.  Later in the game, as Ken Singleton and John Flaherty were making small talk in the closing innings of a blowout, Flash said something I never thought I’d hear someone say: “This was a good game for the Yankees, as they got Dustin Moseley straightened out.”  Really?  Dustin Moseley is that important?  I think I’m starting to worry again.

Chad Gaudin coughed up a few runs in the eighth, Kerry Wood closed out the ninth, and everyone went home happy.  Yankees 11, Blue Jays 5.

Git it in gear, fellas. That sombitch Bautista hit a game-winning dinger and spit in yer grill last night. You gunna just take that?

We’ll be root-root-rootin’ you on…

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

[Picture by Bags]

Mr. Rothko on a rainy day…

Over at the Pinstriped Bible, Jay Jaffe weighs in on Javier Vazquez being skipped a turn:

Like an injured wasp, Javier Vazquez is still able to sting once in awhile, but he’s desperately in need of being relieved of his misery with a rolled-up newspaper, or at the very least swatted to the sidelines. On Saturday, his season reached another low point, as he yielded four runs in three innings against the Mariners, the majors’ lowest-scoring team. While the Yankees nonetheless emerged with a win thanks to strong work from Chad Gaudin and a late offensive burst which produced five unanswered runs, the start marked the third straight time that Vazquez had failed to reach five innings.

Alas, this should surprise exactly no one. After Vazquez allowed 10 baserunners and six runs (three earned) in 5.1 innings during his first start of the month, manager Joe Girardi admitted that his velocity was down, while pitching coach Dave Eiland conceded, “He has a little dead arm,” which isn’t as serious as it sounds. “Dead arm” is a term for muscular fatigue, a warning sign from the body but something which will improve with rest, rather than a structural problem with ligaments or cartilage which would require intervention.

What Will Johnny Do?

Go back to Boston? Thomas Wolfe said you can never go home again, though Boston was never really Damon’s home, just the most-celebrated stop of his career. On the other hand, Damon was an army brat, so who knows? I assume he’ll end up back at the Fens when all is said and done here, though I’d be amused if he stayed with the Tigers.

Rays manager, Joe Maddon, hopes Damons stays put as well.

Bacon, lettuce and fried greenish tomato…

Why the hell not?

From Ideas in Food.

I’m not afraid to admit it, I went through a heavy Bob and Doug phase. Had both of the albums, had ’em memorized.

Yes, I was a dork: