Monthly Archives: June 2011

Our pals, the Three Amigos, are doing some fine work over at PB.

Here’s Cliff on Derek Jeter

Goldie on Eduardo Nunez and Jesus Montero and

Jay on Fab Five Freddy and the  incredible Curtis Granderson.

Class is in session.

There’s a good Varsity Letters tonight featuring Robert Lipsyte. Also on the venue is Robert Weintraub author of “The House that Ruth Built.” Dig the interview with Weintraub, here.

And if you are around tonight, check, check it out.

Smitten Kitchen crushes purple potatoes and I feel hungry.

Before the 2009 post season, Alex Rodriguez was frequently vilified for his alleged inability to get a hit when it really mattered. Following a historic clutch performance that October, which included three game tying homeruns in the seventh inning or later, many of the skeptics were quieted. Since then, however, some of the doubters have gradually started to re-emerge, with many emboldened by Arod’s extended slump earlier this season.

The debate over Arod’s “clutchability” has involved a countless number of hours over the last eight years, so perhaps it’s time to settle the issue once and for all? Off the bat, let’s circle back to Win Probability Added (WPA), and see what that metric says about Arod’s context-based contribution to victory.

Note: Data as of May 31, 2011.
Source: Baseball-reference.com

Since Arod joined the team in 2004, he has easily been the Yankees’ most productive player in terms of WPA. In fact, his total of 25.6 wins added is not only greater than the next two closest Yankees combined, but also fifth best among all major leaguers. So, if Arod really has been a failure in the clutch, his production in low leverage situations would have to be off the charts.

Because there isn’t one statistic* that can help us settle the debate, we have no choice but to take a closer look at every HR and RBI Arod has accumulated as a Yankee.

*There is a WPA-based stat called “clutch”, but it is a relative metric that essentially penalizes a player for performing well in lower leverage situations. Therefore, it isn’t useful for our purposes (click here for a more detailed explanation of “clutch”).

Arod’s HR and RBI Breakdown, 2004-2011

Note: Data as of May 31, 2011. Outer circle displays RBIs; inner circle displays HRs. Colors get lighter as score differential increases.
Source: Baseball-reference.com

The donut chart above helps to dispel that myth that Arod does most of his damage “when the team has a 10-run lead” (he only has six home runs when the Yankees have been ahead or behind by 10 runs).  In fact, almost 50% of his HRs and RBIs have come with the score either tied or within one run, rates that are not only above the team average during Arod’s tenure, but either in line with or better than a selection of comps from the recent dynasty era.

Note: Data as of May 31, 2011.
Source: Baseball-reference.com

A tie game in the first inning isn’t quite the same as a knotted score in the ninth, so another way we can break down Arod’s performance is by leverage. Based on this comparison, Rodriguez once again compares favorably to both the team average during his time in pinstripes as well as our select group of Yankees’ standouts.

Leverage-Based Performance, Team and Select Players, 2004-2011

Note: Data as of May 31, 2011
Source: Baseball-reference.com

Leverage can be an abstract concept, so perhaps the misconception about Arod stems from a lack of high profile moments? Once again, however, that theory fails when confronted by facts. Since 2004, the Yankees’ have hit 58 homeruns in the ninth inning or later that either tied the game or gave the team a lead/walk off. Of that total, Arod has accounted for 15, or over one-quarter. Not only is that twice as many as Jason Giambi’s seven over the same span, but it’s also the fourth highest amount in franchise history since 1950. What’s more, the Yankees have hit 20 such home runs in their post season history and Arod has two of them (both occurring in 2009).

Clutch HRs/Hits in the Ninth Inning or Later, Since 1950

Note: Data as of May 31, 2011. Includes all HRs/hits that either tied the game or gave the Yankees a lead/walkoff.
Source: Baseball-reference.com

Over the last eight years, so many great Yankee moments have been punctuated by Alex Rodriguez. However, because of the expectations inspired by both his immense talent and enormous contract, the myth about Arod’s inability to hit in clutch will likely persist. Although the debate can be grating, it really doesn’t matter anyway. Those with a firmer grasp of reality know full well just how potent Rodriguez has been in pinstripes. Everyone else is just clutching at straws.

I love Gene Hackman as much as I’ve ever loved any actor.

Dig this short Q&A with Hackman from the latest issue of GQ:

GQ: You worked with Coppola on The Conversation. He’s a director who has a “reputation.” Tell me about that movie.

Hackman: He wanted Brando for that part. But it’s not too bad to be second to Brando. [laughs] We rehearsed—normally you don’t get a lot of rehearsal in films. We took advantage of Francis having some juice, because he’d just finished The Godfather. It was a good experience, because he’s such a confident filmmaker. It was great because it was about something. It was about paranoia, the whole idea of eavesdropping. He’s a very hands-on director, but after rehearsal he left me alone. But you knew what was required of you. Most directors, if sensitive at all and think an actor knows what he’s doing in a film, have the good sense to leave him alone, and he did that.

GQ: If someone were to portray you, what would be the key to “getting” you?

Hackman: That’s a tough one. Almost anything one would say would sound egotistical. [pauses] I’d like to think that if an actor was playing me, that he would do me in an honest fashion. I always try to approach the work in that way, regardless of how good or bad the script. When I say “honest,” I say to portray what is on the page, instead of what maybe people might think of me or what I would like them to think of me in terms of personality or charisma. But just be what is asked of me on the page.

[Drawing by Jerry Vaughan]

After 19 seasons, Shaq is calling it a career. Next stop: Hall of Fame.

The Yanks scored early again today. In the first, Alex Rodriguez doubled home Derek Jeter, and in the fourth, Nick Swisher hit a three-run home run into the left field bleachers. That after he attempted to bunt on the first two pitches.

After the game, Swisher told reporters, “I thought I was told to lay one down. So finally after it got to 2-0 and the pitching coach came out I went over to (Pena) and said, ‘Hey man, what do you want me to do right here?’ He said, ‘I want you to let it loose.’ So I did.”

It proved to be enough as the Bombers leave Oakland with a three-game-sweep of the A’s. A.J. Burnett allowed a first inning home run, a two-run shot to Josh Willingham, but didn’t have any trouble with the A’s after that. Joba Chamberlain put two men on in the eighth, but then speared a line drive off the bat of Conor Jackson and turned a double play to end the inning.

Final Score: Yanks 4, A’s 2.

No complaints here as the Red Sox lost again to the White Sox in Boston.

Smiles all round, especially from Swisher, who had this to say to Kim Jones:

“I feel great. I feel like myself again. My personality is back. You know, I’m out of that dark place. So, either way my teammates have been amazing for me, my family and everybody. It’s been a wonderful trip so far. You learn a lot about yourself when you’re in those times. So for myself, I just wanna keep going out there, keep battling, and keep picking up those wins because everyone loves winning.”

Amen to that.

[Photo Credit: Ben Margot/AP and roly]

It is raining in Oakland. Let’s hope the Yanks and A’s get the game in.

We’ll be root, root, rootin’ for the road grays:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photograph by Eugenia Kyriakopoulou]

Last night on the bus up in the Bronx, dude decked out in Bonds gear.

Go figure.

UNDER THE SPELL OF THE BIG SCREEN

By John Schulian

We didn’t have a TV in our house until 1954, when I was nine. Maybe it was for economic reasons, maybe my parents just didn’t think it was important. They seemed perfectly content with listening to the radio, my mother in particular. I listened along with her. The first thing I remember hearing was the news that Babe Ruth had died. Honest. I was three years old and I had not the slightest idea who the Babe was, but there was something about the way the man on the radio talked about him that made it possible for even a child like me to grasp the importance of his death. Just remembering that moment makes me feel older than dirt. It’s the same when I remember listening to Tom Mix’s radio show-–his doctor was my mother’s doctor, by the way-–and Fibber McGee and Molly, Lum and Abner, Arthur Godfrey, and Art Likletter’s House Party. Linkletter’s band leader had one of the great names ever: Muzzy Marcellino. Muzzy, for crying out loud.

Something else we listened to was Lux Radio Theater, where Hollywood stars of a certain wattage acted in half-hour recreations of movies that were then in the theaters. In my house, we ate up movies, all three of us in the beginning, then just my father and me as time went on. There wasn’t any reason for this movie love. My parents weren’t star-struck, nor were they given to long, thoughtful discussions of performances, directing choices, or cinematography, good or bad. It was just something that was in the air in L.A. along with the aroma of the orange groves and the stench of the burning tires that warmed them on winter nights. If you listened to the radio, you could even hear broadcasts of the premieres of big movies and breathless interviews with stars like Cary Grant and Lana Turner.

The movie house we went to most often was the Academy, an art deco palace near the intersection of Manchester and Crenshaw boulevards. (It’s now a church.) If I went to see Burt Lancaster in “The Crimson Pirate” with my parents on Saturday night, I’d be back at 1 p.m. Wednesday for the kiddie matinee, two movies for a quarter. Might be two Abbott and Costello comedies, or two war movies (“Halls of Montezuma” with Richard Widmark and “Operation Pacific” with John Wayne), or an Audie Murphy Western paired with one starring Jeff Chandler, or-–hang onto your hat–“King Kong” and “Mighty Joe Young.”

Come summer we’d head for the Centinela Drive-In, where we saw “Shane,” “Strategic Air Command” and the truly awful circus movie “The Greatest Show on Earth.” (There’s a scene in “Heat” that was shot at an abandoned drive-in. I’d swear it was the Centinela, which sits in what is now regarded as hard-core gang territory.)

When 3-D movies were all the rage-–”Hondo,” “Charge at Feather River,” “House of Wax”–we went to see them at the big movie houses on Hollywood Boulevard, which was still glamorous and exciting then. (The first movie I remember seeing was “Pinocchio,” at the Pantages.) Afterward, we’d eat at Café de Paris, a little French restaurant around the corner from Charlie Chaplin’s studio. My father’s French buddies hung out there. My parents ate escargot and I drank Shirley Temples.

And then it was just my father and me going to the movies. It had to be by design. My parents were ancient by the standards of the day: when they married, my father was 41 and my mother 39. My guess is she was going through menopause and desperately needed some time away from her rambunctious son.

It was a blessing in disguise for my father and me. We didn’t get to spend much time together, mainly because he worked such long hours and spent a lot of time sleeping in his easy chair when he was home. I don’t want you to think he was distant or cold, though. He was, rather, the nicest man I have ever known. He was charming and funny and gracious, and he had a Danish accent that gave him, I don’t know, a continental air, I guess you’d call it. No wonder he oversaw all the big weddings in Salt Lake when he became catering manager of the Hotel Utah, the No. 1 hotel in the city. He took care of not just Mormons but Greeks and Jews and Italians and anybody else who wanted to be treated right. He loved them all, but he loved the good tippers best. To me, however, he was the dad who took me to see the Hollywood Stars in the old Coast League. And who played catch with me in the backyard, and, when we lived in Inglewood, took me to sprawling Centinela Park to pitch me batting practice and hit me fly balls. And remember, he’d never played an inning of baseball. He was a Danish immigrant who didn’t see a game until he worked in Chicago at a hotel where the big league teams stayed. He told me about players who took out their tobacco chaws only to eat, and of how forlorn the Pirates-–well, I think it was the Pirates–were when the Cubs’ Gabby Hartnett beat them with his Homer in the Gloamin’.

Truth be told, though, he was probably more comfortable going to the movies with me. His choice of theaters was an odd one, not any of the first-run houses, the Academy or the 5th Avenue or the United Artists, but a second-run house called the Inglewood Theater. And it was there that my education in movies, such as it is, began. We saw the John Ford-John Wayne cavalry trilogy, and “The Big Sleep” and Red Skelton comedies and Robert Mitchum in “Blood on the Moon.” Sometimes the old movies bored me witless-–”Saratoga Trunk” with Gary Cooper, in particular-–but more often they fed my imagination and my dreams.

The fact is, I loved movies before I loved baseball. For all I know, I read the movie ads in the newspaper before anything else. And I read Louella Parsons’ column, too, checking it for movie-star names in boldface. Then I would cut out the movie ads and paste them in a scrapbook, which wasn’t as pointless an exercise as it might seem, because I would then use the title of a movie that had captured my imagination and create my version of it. The movie I remember was “Kansas Pacific,” a Republic Pictures Western starring Sterling Hayden that I didn’t get around to watching until a couple of years ago. It was dreadful.) I drew the story in cartoon blocks on pieces of paper about the size of a postcard and I taped or glued the pieces together. Then I took a piece of cardboard, drew a screen with curtains around it, and cut slits on both sides of the screen. Then I would pull the strip of paper on which my movie was laid out through the slits while I provided the dialogue and narration. nd my parents would watch. But only after they had paid a nickel or a dime for the privilege. Even then, at the age of 9 or 10, I realized that movies were for making money.

There was something at work besides the profit motive, though. It was the ability to imagine, to let a couple of words in a newspaper inspire me to create the most primitive kind of art. I suppose the same forces were at work when I listened to the Mutual Game of the Day on the radio and envisioned what the Green Monster in Fenway Park looked like and how the ivy on the walls at Wrigley Field was coming in. I could even read about a minor league slugger in the back pages of the Sporting News-–Frosty Kennedy or John Moskus or Chuck Weatherspoon-–and spend my paper route imagining how they looked as they smacked another home run. It was as though I imagined life with a score by Dimitri Tiomkin or Max Steiner and a big, booming orchestra to back them up. If I listen closely, I can still hear the music.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

I like to go to the Matisse room at the Modern and just sit in front of this picture for a good while.

Here’s John Richardson on the picture:

Few, however, have spotted that it is a baton in an artistic relay race that goes from Cézanne to the great period of Matisse’s that this show celebrates, to Cubism. In a letter Matisse wrote to a friend in 1914 was a sketch of a goldfish bowl on a table set off against the railings of his studio balcony. The sketch included the artist himself, holding a rectangular palette just as his hero, Cézanne, does in a famous 1885 self-portrait. In the course of working on the painting, however, Matisse did a vanishing act, whittling his image down to a vestigial scaffolding. All that remains is the palette with a thumb in it. I see this iconic white rectangle as the baton in the relay race of modern art. Trust Picasso to pick up on it, when, a year later, he came to paint his tragic, self-reverential Harlequin (which also belongs to MoMA). Seeing this late Cubist masterpiece, Ma­tisse hailed it as his arch-rival’s greatest work to date, because it owed everything to him. For years, nobody could figure out what he meant. The link? What else but Cézanne’s palette. Cézanne had passed it on to Matisse, who had used it to signify himself. Ma­tisse had then passed it on to Picasso, who had turned it into a barely perceptible self-portrait on a rectilinear canvas his Harlequin alter ego is clutching. Subsequent abstractionists would pass the baton from one to another until there was nothing left but a blank rectangle.

I love seeing all the under painting, you can see the work, and imagine Matisse busting his tail to resolve the picture to his liking.

Say word.

Is there anything more civilized than taking a walk in Manhattan after a meal? That’s just what I did with the wife last Saturday night. We strolled through through the west village when we heard a trumpet playing “Blue Bossa.” I love that tune no end and I looked ahead to see where the street musician was. I couldn’t see anyone when I looked up and high in the sky saw a figure sitting in a window playing his horn.

I know I’ve played this tune before but it makes me so damned happy here it is again:

I went to school in the Bay Area from 1987 to 1991, just an hour or so away from what was then called Alameda County Coliseum. I always did my best to convince someone to make the trip across the Bay with me whenever the Yankees came to town, and even in the first few years after I graduated and returned to Southern California, I had enough college friends — even one who was a Yankee fan — who had remained up there to justify weekend road trips up north whenever the Yankees came out west.

The problem, of course, was that the during the late 80s, when the Yankees were at least above average, they always performed miserably on the west coast; in the 90s they were just plain awful. The A’s, meanwhile, were world-beaters, a team of superlatives from top to bottom. Their manager was hailed on the cover of Sports Illustrated as The Mastermind, and the closer he created revolutionized the game. Their right fielder wasn’t yet outing steroid cheats or allowing fly balls to bounce off of his head and over fences; he was simply the most prodigious talent in the game.

The results of these match-ups were predictably one-sided, but no one could ever have predicted how one-sided they actually were. In 1990, for example, the Yankees dropped all 12 games to the A’s and were outscored 62-12. A quick look at that 1990 roster reveals a team of injured stars, false prospects, failed free agents, and sideshows. Don Mattingly was there, but the back troubles had started by then, and Donnie Baseball only made it into 102 games and hit a paltry .256. Dave Winfield was old and injured and only managed sixty-seven plate appearances. Kevin Maas and Hensley “Bam Bam” Meulens were top prospects, but neither would amount to anything. Steve Sax, Jesse Barfield, and Mel Hall all made in the neighborhood of a million dollars, but none of the three earned his keep. For entertainment value, though, there was Deion Sanders and his .158 batting average, as well as the voodoo antics of Pascual Pérez. It’s no surprise that that ragtag group finished dead last.

The starting catcher most nights that season was Bob Geren, the current A’s manager, and you couldn’t blame him on Tuesday night if he thought back to that 1990 team as he sat in the Oakland dugout and wondered how he came to be on both wrong sides of the same rivalry, first as a Yankee back then, and then twenty years later as the skipper of the Athletics. Over the last three seasons Geren’s A’s have been 4-21 against the Bombers, and things aren’t getting any better for them in 2011.

If Monday afternoon was about Bartolo Colón, Tuesday night was all about the Score Truck. Mr. Almost 3000 started things out with an infield single, and Curtis Granderson opened up the scoring by launching a home run deep into the right field stands for a 2-0 Yankee lead before the seats were warm. (Granderson’s line on the night, by the way, was pretty impressive: 3 for 5, HR, 4 RBIs, 2 R, SB)

Jeter reached base again in the third inning, this time on a Mark Ellis error, and Alex Rodríguez came up with that rarest Yankee hit this year, the two-out RBI, as he grounded a single up the middle to push the lead to 3-0. Not to be outdone, Granderson came up with a two-out hit of his own in the next inning, this one coming with the bases loaded and scoring two. In the fifth, Robinson Canó laced a no-doubter over the big wall in right field, scoring two more and giving the Yankees a 7-1 lead.

Meanwhile, starter Freddy García was holding the Athletics at bay with his usual buffet of fastballs, curves, and changeups. He struggled a bit in the middle innings, giving up a run in the third, barely slithering out of a bases-loaded jam in the fourth, and surrendering a two-run homer (David DeJesus) in the fifth, but he settled down to skate through the sixth and seventh innings and eventually earn the win. If you had told me in March that the Yankees would be depending hugely on both Colón and García, I’d have thought you were crazy; now I can’t imagine where this team would be without them.

Aside from all this, there were a few interesting notes that should be mentioned.

• Jeter picked up two base hits, bringing his total to 2,983.
• Granderson’s first-inning homer off Brett Anderson was his 9th off a lefty, tops in baseball.
• The Yankees stole four bases in a game for the second day in a row.
• One of those steals came from Mark Teixeira, who stole home. I could explain exactly how this happened, but I think it’s more fun to leave you imagining that he pranced down the line like Jackie Robinson, bobbing and weaving, feinting and flinching, staring at Brad Ziegler and daring him to step off the rubber before finally putting his head down and breaking for the plate, sliding in in a cloud of dust with spikes high, barely beating the throw. Yeah, that’s how it happened.

All of that added up to a 10-3 Score Truck win. We’ve seen two of the young Oakland phenom pitchers and roughed ’em but good, but we’ve got another one coming tomorrow. Wouldn’t a sweep be nice?

[Photo Credit: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images]