Monthly Archives: April 2011

Alex Rodriguez is not in the line up tonight but we’ll still be cheering.

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Image from Winter Leaf.com]

Ah, Natalie…

…to the great white north.

Yanks at the Jays tonight. Cliff has the preview and so does SNY:

Hipster Spidey…

[Drawing by Allison Smith as found via This Isn’t Happiness]

…as one of the best Jersey blogs (and beyond), our man Larry Roibal.

The Grilled Cheese Invitational? Are you kidding me? Bred-Butter-Cheese-Victory!

Saveur has the skinny–or the chubby, as it were. Oh, and some nifty recipes for grilled cheese.

Richard Sandomir talks to Clyde about…style.

It’s been an entire year since Guru died.

Salute.

Chris Jones on Jeff Bridges in the new issue of Esquire:

“If some crazy idea stays in my head for long enough, then there’s no fighting it,” he says. “I just say, Okay, let’s go. Let’s do this.”

Bridges was sixteen or seventeen years old when he learned to stop fighting it. He had acted a few times — his first tearful lines onscreen were spoken to his black-and-white father, Lloyd, on an episode of Sea Hunt — but he wasn’t sure that acting was what he wanted to do. He liked music better, experimenting with his brother Beau’s guitar, along with other objects and instruments. His family had a beach house back then, down in Malibu, and one night, as he and some friends were leaving, he saw that they had left a light on deep inside the house. He went back to turn it off and click: He was in blackness.

“Normally, we push away the things we’re scared of,” Bridges says. “But for some reason, that night, I decided to let that fear in. I decided that it was okay for me to be afraid of the dark.”

He imagined all those things that aren’t there in the light. And by the time his friends came back inside and snapped on the lights — he had remained inside the darkened house for so long — they found him curled up in a ball on the floor, trembling and bathed in tears and sweat. He had opened the door to fear, and fear had rushed in.

“And then there was a rose,” he says now, looking clear through the fog. A single rose, in a tiny vase, on a table. And he imagined that the rose hid the same things that the dark kept hidden, and he felt his heart start racing again. He was terrified of the rose, and that’s the exact moment when Jeff Bridges learned the secret that would unlock the rest of his life. That night, he learned that there was no such thing as acting. There was only imagination, and that long succession of dreams and nightmares we all harbor. And if only he continued to let everything in — if all of us decided to let everything in — those things would join our imaginations and carry us wherever we might want to go.

The 2011 season marks the 10th season of baseball on the YES Network, and YESNetwork.com. I was there for the first five and remember the trials, tribulations, sweat, tears, conniptions and aneurysms that went into putting forth a top-flight product on a daily basis. Looking at where the overall coverage is now compared to 2002, the difference is like listening to a song in Mono and then flipping to Stereo.

Technology made my job easier, just as it has made the jobs of beat writers and columnists more efficient. Hardware, software and fiberoptic advances made it easier for scribes to file stories on deadline, fact-check, and ensure accuracy of quotes. Laptop computers, digital/tape recording devices, headphones, WiFi access to the Internet, and the Internet itself have helped reduce the latency that previously existed for the written word to reach fans. These products and services were available in 2002, but have become consistently better over time.

Due to the immediacy of the publication and distribution of information of all kinds, sports teams and leagues reacted accordingly. I don’t know what the current Social Media policies are for MLB, or the Press Box protocol for it. When I was covering games regularly, Social Media as we currently know it didn’t exist. If the Yankees had information to be released, they made it clear to both Mark Feinsand — who at the time was the Yankees.com beat man — and I that we could not publish the info to either Yankees.com or YESNetwork.com before the team OK’d it.

It was made clear that we were not allowed to break certain stories. (This most commonly occurred when players were named to the All-Star ballot or All-Star team, and other similar stories.) So, we would load the items into the system and wait for the go-ahead from Yankees’ PR staff. Twitter, Facebook, and other microblogging services must be a nightmare for team PR staffs looking to maintain a certain level of control over the flow of information.

In addition to the publication advances, informational sites like Baseball Almanac, Baseball Reference, Baseball Prospectus, Fangraphs, and tools like those available at Inside Edge, ESPN.com’s Gamecast and MLB.com’s GameDay do the heavy lifting, to where the writer can provide the originally intended core function: storytelling.

Even storytelling has gotten a facelift. Perhaps no single entity has affected the craft like Twitter. Many of the writers’ handles are affiliated with their employers, so they are easily identifiable. Follow them during games, you can time the tweets of key plays and events to when they appear in GameDay or Gamecast. In a way, it’s replaced the “running” game story that was once a staple of the beat writer’s portfolio.

Some beat reporters use Twitter in a unique and innovative way. For example, Marc Carig of the Newark Star-Ledger makes it part of his modus operandi to Tweet quotes from certain players as they’re drafting their recaps. Maybe those quotes will appear in their stories, maybe they won’t. But the preview gives you the reader a definite reason to check. I’m amazed at the level of multitasking these men and women can endure.

(more…)

Anthony McCarron has a piece in the News today about the Yankees’ offense. Here’s a quote from general manager, Brian Cashman:

“Jeter is not hitting up to his ability, (Curtis) Granderson is not hitting for average and Gardner is struggling mightily. Those guys are our foot soldiers and since they are not firing, it makes us look one-dimensional. No biggie. We’re capable of running you down, hitting, hitting the ball over the fence.

“We have full capabilities. We just haven’t shown it yet.”

An innocuous quote. But what strikes  me is the term “foot soldiers.” We hear this kind of thing all the time in sports–so I don’t mean to pick on Cashman–where professional jocks are described as “warriors” who “do battle,” ready to “go to war.” Guys who play sports for a living, often guys who are paid handsomely and are in fact celebrities. These statements are made in an unthinking, self-absorbed manner and should not be taken literally. But still, they are words and words have power and at a time when our country is at war these military metaphors are gross and foolish.

More rain in the forecast for tomorrow. Bring yer umbrellas…

In the meantime, Yanks have the night off, so whether youse watching the NBA playoffs or waiting for Elijah to come knock-knock-knockin’ on your front door, feel free to fall through and kibbitz away.

[Picture by Jean Jacques Andre]

Over at SI.com, here’s Will Carroll on Alex Rodriguez’s recent injury:

More speculation? Yes, the chatter got pretty loud when Rodriguez came out of Saturday’s game with what was described after the game as stiffness in his oblique/back. Was this a situation related to his history of hip issues? Simply put — no. This kind of vagueness is a result of the precision we normally see from MRIs not being available on manual testing. Rodriguez’s injury is in that overlap zone where it’s difficult to tell without more advanced tests exactly where the problem is. So why not do it? It’s unnecessary cost and time. The Yankees knew at that point that it was a day-to-day situation, using the experience of their long-time Athletic Trainers. The weather was a factor, I’m told, as the cold day in the Bronx contributed to the tightness. Rodriguez was held out of Sunday’s game, but feels he caught it before it got more serious. The Yankees will watch him closely, but I think knowing there was an off-day Monday tipped the decision to rest him.

[Photo Credit: Herve Bertrand]

Pauline Kael on Woody’s first trip into heaviosity, Interiors:

The people in Woody Allen’s Interiors are destroyed by the repressiveness of good taste, and so is the picture. Interiors is a puzzle movie, constructed like a well-made play from the American past, and given the beautiful, solemn visual clarity of a Bergman film, without, however the eroticism of Bergman.

Interiors looks so much like a masterpiece, and has such a super-banal metaphysical theme (death versus life) that it’s easy to see why many regard it as a masterpiece: it’s deep on the surface. Interiors has moviemaking fever, all right, but in a screwed-up form — which is possibly what the movie is all about.

The movie is so unfunny it’s not even funny. Actually, it’s so unfunny that it’s funny, which is funny because the last thing it wants to be is funny.

More brilliance via the Subway Art Blog.

[Picture by VH McKenzie]

At the gym during my lunch hour today, the place scattered with middle-aged men an women grunting, working out their demons, relieving stress, shaping up their bodies for the summer. Two men stretched out on mats next to each other doing crunches.

One says to the other, “They laid off a bunch of people at my work last week.”

“No way.”

“Way. I’m feeling very vulnerable now.”

They work in silence for a moment and then:

“Well, I’m sure you’ll be okay. You are a hard worker.”

“Yeah, that and $2.25 will get you on the subway.”

They go back to grunting.

David Lebovitz has bacon in Switzerland and it leaves him speechless.

The wife has new photo notecards, fresh direct for Mother’s Day.

Check ’em out at her site, Blue Pear Prints.

Diane makes the big time.

Mazelprops.

Monday Morning Smile…