Monthly Archives: January 2011

New Yorkers step out from the warm hole in the ground into the cold.

I frequently turn to the minors for these Names of the Week because while there are plenty of awesomely named big-leaguers, often they’re well known enough so that most of you guys will have already heard of them, and in some cases gotten so used to the name that you’ve become inured to its wonders (e.g. Coco Crisp, “Randy Johnson, The Big Unit,” Prince Fielder, etc). The other good bet is to turn to the past, when men were men and ballplayers had f****** awesome names. Today’s pick was born in Eddy, Texas, in 1904, which is likely why he was known as:

Tex Nugent.

Well, I thought it was funny.

Nugent’s given name is Granville, which is pretty good in its own right. He was a career minor leaguer, playing from 1926 to 1941 for the Terre Haute Tots (!) (alongside Uke Clanton and Watty Clark), the Little Rock Travelers, the Midland Cowboys, and the El Dorado Lions, among other teams. No date of death is listed on baseball-reference, which makes a late-in-life career switch to rock star a possibility, though still perhaps unlikely.

Meantime, bonus points are awarded to the Mets for acquiring Taylor Tankersley; as Greg at Faith and Fear in Flushing points out, with plausible poesy,  the Amazin’s have taken on an alliterative trio this winter: the aforementioned T. Tankersley, Chris Capuano and, of course, previous Name of the Week honoree Boof Bonser. I take this as a clear sign that the Mets are once again moving in the right direction.

I made a quick dip to the Modern during my lunch hour to look at pictures: There it is, in black and white.

And with Archie Bunker on the brain, here’s an oldie but goodie from 3rd Bass with an AB sample.

“All in the Family” debuted 40 years ago today. Over at Salon.com, Matt Zoller Seitz writes about why the show still matters:

TV today is inhospitable to series like “All in the Family.” This is only partly due to TV’s splintering from a handful of channels into hundreds. An equal or larger part of the blame can be laid at the feet of broadcast network executives and their marketers, who figured out (sometime in the late ‘80s) that they could make more ad money by junking the “Big Tent” model and appealing to white college graduates with loads of disposable income – a description that rules out anyone who looks or sounds like a character from “All in the Family” (even Mike or Gloria). Except for certain corners of cable – specifically channels that thrive on shows about violent crime and/or revolve around working-class or poor characters – you don’t hear people talking about race, class, religion or politics unless the dialogue is jocular and sarcastic and “just kidding” (like the banter on “Glee” and “Community”) or the earnest centerpiece of a Very Special Episode. And can you remember the last time a broadcast network built a sitcom around fiftysomething, pear-shaped, working-class married people — of any color? Pretty much every modern sitcom lead is under 40 (or trying hard to look it) and fashionably thin or buff.

Since the early ’80s, the networks have done their best to gentrify prime time, banishing demographically déclassé characters and subjects while retaining elements that marketers call “sexy” (code for “flashily empty”). Little remains of Lear’s legacy but cursing, innuendo, and the sound of flushing toilets. The template for most modern network sitcoms is “Friends” — which, contrary to the “Seinfeld” mantra, truly was a Show about Nothing. Modern network sitcoms are mostly about dating, parenthood and office politics; they deal with hot-button issues in a glancing, glib way if they address them at all. Some are lame. Some are amusing. A few are brilliant. None is the equal of “All in the Family.” Those were the days.

Congratulations are in order for the Tampa Bay Rays, who are on the verge of acquiring one Kyle Farnsworth for the low, low price of, per Buster Olney, 3.25 million dollars plus an option.

Oh, where do we start. How about with evil maniacal laughter?

Now that you’ve gotten that out of your system, I think this is both good and bad news for the Yankees. Good news because it is entirely possible that the Rays will call in Farnsworth to try to protect close leads, which is likely to mean a lot of heartbreaking late Rays losses on towering home runs. Bad news because now it would be a really, really bad idea for New York to start any kind of scuffle with Tampa. Yankee batters better be nice and respectful and not crowd the plate.

In fact, Farnworth has pitched very well against the Yanks on multiple occasions, and had some very good years along with his bad, and supposedly has a new approach these days that involves throwing fewer  sliders that don’t slide directly down the middle of the plate… and so he may not end up being a terrible pickup for the Rays. Conceivably.

Nevertheless, [rubbing hands together sinisterly] MWA HA HA HA HA HA!

Over at River Ave Blues, our pal Joe Pawlikowski takes a look at Jorge Posada’s career.

Is Posada a Hall of Famer? Like Bernie Williams and Andy Pettitte, he’s close, that’s for sure.

[Photo Credit: SI.com]

Anyone ever had Wickles? I have not but a friend hipped me to their existence and damn, they sound mad tasty.

Tonight, the latest episode of American Masters is about the career of Jeff Bridges. He’s a favorite around these parts…Check it out.

For my Jazz Heads…

Wasn’t that bad at all, was it?

Troopin’ to work in the BX.

Haven’t ya heard?

[Photo by Ari Joseph]

Trevor Hoffman, the all-time saves leader, is retiring. He wasn’t great in the post-season but that doesn’t undermine his excellence. Plus, he had a beautiful delivery, and that hellacious change-up.

Happy Trails, Hoss.

The Yankees have signed Luis Sojo to be their fifth starter Single-A Tampa manager.

Are you happy now, Heyman?!

Photo of Sojo at Old Timer's Day looking pretty much exactly like he did in his playing days via The Daily News

Serious Eats has a slide show of their favorite burgers of 2010:

A Brooklyn freestyle for lunch:

Masta Ace’s verse always cracks me up.

Last Friday night I went to the Little Lebowski shop on Thompson Street. It is run by a friendly guy named Rob Preston, a movie nut who previously worshipped cult classics like “Time Bandits” and “Withnail and I.”

The shop is filled with Lebowski t-shirts and toys.

It’s worth the trek if you dig all things Lebowski.

There’s Roy, pictured with Bridges, who paid a visit not too long ago:

Watch the full episode. See more American Masters.

Ali and Cosell: A Good Combination.

[Picture by Boxing Insider.com]

Word is the Yanks are interested in Andruw Jones to be their fourth outfielder. Seems like just yesterday when Jones was a kid whipping the Yanks in the first two games of the ’96 Serious.

[Photo Credit: lbrownie]

“Still Life (The Blue Vase),” By Giorgio Morandi (1920)

photo from laobserved.com

Last week Dodgers owner Frank McCourt met with MLB executives, per the LA Times — though not with Bud Selig personally, who presumably was too busy writing Petrarchan sonnets about Abner Doubleday – and discussed his plans to keep the Dodgers, after a judge tossed out the post-nuptial agreement between him and his ex-wife Jamie that would have given him full control over the team. The LA Times article points out that Selig has the power to veto any kind of TV deal, financing plan from MLB, or partenership agreement that McCourt might come up with — and the Dodgers owner will likely need one of those things to hang onto his team and pay off his former wife.

Which brings up once again the MLB Commissioner’s baffling power when it comes to deciding exactly who gets into baseball’s 100% male, 96.67% white, 100% non-Mark Cuban ownership club. In how many other industries do a group of competitors get together and decide who else gets to compete against them? Let me rephrase that – in how many other industries do they do that legally? As much as I love baseball I can’t think of any rational justification for why they still have an anti-trust exemption. Not the NFL, not the NBA – but baseball, see, is not a “commercial enterprise”. Right.

Not that I can blame Selig for being irate at McCourt, a man who, with his ex-wife, spent millions on the Rasputin-esque Russian  “mystic”/”physicist” Vladimir Shpunt (and if you somehow haven’t read about Shpunt before, please, do yourself a favor and dig in – it warms these cold winter days), among many other less amusing screw-ups. It might in fact be in the Dodgers’ best interest if Selig forced McCourt out, but how is that right or fair? I’m particularly skeptical since it was Selig and the owners who decided to let McCourt buy the team in the first place. Don’t you just hate it when you screen someone carefully to make sure they belong in your exclusive country club, and then they go and have a messy public divorce! The nerve! And after all you did for them…

It’s safe to say that the country has bigger problems at the moment, and baseball has gotten along all right — more or less — for this long with its rigged ownership system in place. But something so blatantly unfair can hardly be good for the sport long term. Every once in a while you get a iconoclast like Bill Veeck who manages to get into the club and shakes things up from the inside – you could even say Steinbrenner did that, in his own way and for better or worse – but those guys are few and far between and getting fewer, as the amount of money needed to buy a team gets staggeringly high. Baseball deserves better than to be entrusted to a closed-off group of  crusty old multimillionaires who vote like sheep on who gets to join their ranks. I am not advocating Vladimir Shpunt for Dodgers owner — although actually that would be completely awesome, but… right, no. But this is a system that’s about 100 years out of date and ripe for some modernization.