One of the best parts about visiting my relatives in Belgium when I was a kid was eating Frites. They were served in a paper cone and were so much better than fries here in the States. These days you can get Belgium-style fried potatoes in New York, like at Pommes Frites in the East Village.
Serious Eats tries all of the dipping sauces.
Hells yeah.
Here’s Chad Jennings on Michael Pineda’s outing yesterday:
“That’s my baby,” Pineda said. “I threw a very good slider today, but I’m very excited because my changeup was great. I threw a lot of changeups today and felt comfortable. … Last year, I didn’t throw a lot of changeups, so this year, I’m focused a little more on my changeup and making a good pitch all the time. I’m not worried about my fastball. I don’t know how my fastball is right now, but it feels good.”
That’s the progress the Yankees were hoping to see.
“It’s nice to have success when you’re working at something,” Girardi said. “If you’re making a change or you’re trying to learn a new pitch, it’s nice to have success because I think if you don’t, you’re going to get frustrated, and you’re going to question, do I use it or not? But he’s had some success.”
And more, from Russell Martin:
“I think he was like 88-90 in Clearwater, so it’s coming along. I’m not worried about it. I just want to see the guy pitch. He’s a pitcher like anybody else out there. I just wanted to see him execute pitches. His velocity, he has it in him, it’s just a matter of time. As soon as you put on your uniform, you’re in New York and you get the juices flowing, the velocity is going to pick up no matter what.”
…And if you’re looking for more fastball specifics: “(Pineda) was a little inconsistent trying to throw his fastball away to right-handers. It looked like he was pulling off a little bit.” Martin said it’s an easy thing to correct and could be fixed in a single bullpen.
I’m really looking forward to seeing this kid pitch.
The Cinderella Story is bullshit. It’s just an excuse to laugh and point at the misery of teams and fans with deservedly high expectations. We’re Yankee fans, we should get that.
“Who do you want to win the Series, man on the street?”
“Anyone but the Yankees.”
“Thanks, man on the street. You’re an asshat.”
Whatever. The Yanks are the bullies and the badasses and the rich kids and the guys who get the girls. If anyone deserves that treatment, it’s the Yankees. But the celebration of generic upsets that is March Madness is just cynicism thinly veiled with smile and fist pump.
“Yes, I am really happy really just happy that Bumblefuck U and their 15 fans have won a game and not at all reveling in the tears of that number one or two seed that is obviously a way better team.”
“Man, are you the same asshat that we met on the street earlier?”
The NCAA tournament is one of the great sinkholes. Fall in on a Thursday, emerge on Sunday night. Three days to recharge and reenter on the second Thursday. By the time you climb back out on that second Sunday night, will your job and family still be waiting? Saints, all of them, if they are.
But if your team gets upset on opening night, you’re ripped from the cocoon. Even worse, you’re out, everyone else is in, and you can’t escape the proceedings. You just have to hang at the back of the dance hall, moping, and wait for someone else to join you.
My team has been ousted on opening weekend by lower seeds in its last three appearances and I’m pretty sick of it. One of the matchups featured a good old fashioned soul fucking by the referees and a future NBA star auditioning his supernova in the second half (Davidson and Steph Curry). The other two losses were to teams sprinkled with magical pixie dust – one fast acting (Ohio), the other long lasting (VCU).
Just get to that second weekend. Extend our stay down in the hole. Please. We’ve only got so many more of these tournaments before the NCAA’s blatant corruption and exploitation collapse the enitre eco-system.
This year, the most popular upset pick is Belmont. They didn’t even have to win a game to become this tournament’s darlings. In the past, at least the media would save its slobber for an actual winner. Great for Belmont and all the bullshit offensive fouls they will draw on Friday.
Perhaps it will be mentioned that Ken Pomeroy ranks them as the 23rd best team in the country, and thus likely the best 14th seed in the history of the tournament? Suddenly an upset would not seem so staggering nor suggestive of all that’s right with America. Simply calling it “a fairly likely outcome” wouldn’t even put in dent in Jim Nantz’s hair. But I hope someone at least tells the refs they can call it straight.
I wonder what it does for a big team to be counted out before they even take the floor? What happens when you tell the bad guys the fairy tell ending in advance? I don’t know what follows, but my team copes well with paranoia. So go ahead Belmont. Chuck your threes and and let’s see what happens.
Check out this fun series over at Eater: Bodega Week.
HBO’s series, “Luck,” has been cancelled.
Here are reports by Jon Weisman in Variety, Andrew Cohen in the Atlantic and Matt Zoeller Seitz in New York magazine.
Brings to mind a story Pat Jordan once wrote called “The Horse Lovers.”
Man, just another great shot from the New York Times‘ tumblr site. I remember this Times Square ad well. Actually gave me the chills seeing it again.
I had the King Kong lunch box and thermos when I was in first grade. Dag.
Moebius
Will Leitch on Bryce Harper in the new issue of GQ:
What makes Harper far more anticipated than your typical phenom is a sense that he not only recognizes the vastness of his potential but also feels plenty comfortable telling you about it. One minute he informs me that “baseball needs more superstars.” The next, while discussing Albert Pujols signing with the Angels, he offers thoughtlessly, “Albert and I know each other and respect each other.” In a sport in which “paying your dues” is practically in the job description—an institution that once made Michael Jordan ride around in a bus for five months—Harper seems to have emerged fully formed to piss off the baseball establishment.
On his way up, he didn’t shrink from his sometime moniker, the LeBron of baseball. He poured vats of eye black on his face to make himself look like a professional wrestler. In a minor league game last year, after hitting a home run, he blew a kiss to the opposing pitcher. (Harper tells me, “It was an ‘eff you’ from the mouth.”) That’s the sort of business that will get a major leaguer a fastball in his ear. As Hall of Fame third baseman Mike Schmidt put it: “I would think at some point the game itself, the competition on the field, is going to have to figure out a way to police this young man.”
In other words: Harper is awesome—exactly what baseball needs. He’s essentially a throwback: a cocky, ornery cuss who can back it all up. Ty Cobb minus the racism and chaw, Lenny Dykstra before the bankruptcy. He tells me Pete Rose, a.k.a. Charlie Hustle, is his favorite player and that “I want to play the game hard. I want to ram it down your throat, put you into left field when I’m going into second base.”
[Photo Via The Baseball Analysts]
Over at River Ave, Larry Koestler looks at the 2012 NY Yankees All-Projection Team.
Here’s more on Freddy Garcia from George King in the Post.
[Picture by Bags]
Chris Ballard has a bonus piece on the fall of Antoine Walker in this week’s SI. Worth a read.
Bam Bam
According to Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports, Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni has resigned.
[Cartoon by Andres Franquin]
This scene never fails to crack me up. Ham on rye, extra mustard.
Moebius does Marvel.
Yeah.
I’ve never had the desire to finish a book that I don’t enjoy. If a book doesn’t grab me in the first 20 or 30 pages, I’ll put it down. No guilt. But I’ve also put down books after a hundred pages, books I enjoy, simply because I’m distracted. It’s me, not the book (and I’ve always been impressed by people who read a book cover-to-cover even when they don’t like it). Last month, I read about half of “Dog Soldiers” by Robert Stone. It is excellent and Stone is a wonderful writer but I found the story so disturbing I just didn’t want to hang around that world anymore.
Anyhow, I found this essay by the novelist Tim Parks over at the New York Review of Books, interesting:
I’m not really interested in how we deal with bad books. It seems obvious that any serious reader will have learned long ago how much time to give a book before choosing to shut it. It’s only the young, still attached to that sense of achievement inculcated by anxious parents, who hang on doggedly when there is no enjoyment. “I’m a teenager,” remarks one sad contributor to a book review website. “I read this whole book [it would be unfair to say which] from first page to last hoping it would be as good as the reviews said. It wasn’t. I enjoy reading and finish nearly all the novels I start and it was my determination never to give up that made me finish this one, but I really wish I hadn’t.” One can only encourage a reader like this to learn not to attach self esteem to the mere finishing of a book, if only because the more bad books you finish, the fewer good ones you’ll have time to start.
But what about those good books? …Do we need to finish them? Is a good book by definition one that we did finish? Or are there occasions when we might choose to leave off a book before the end, or even only half way through, and nevertheless feel that it was good, even excellent, that we were glad we read what we read, but don’t feel the need to finish it? I ask the question because this is happening to me more and more often. Is it age, wisdom, senility? I start a book. I’m enjoying it thoroughly, and then the moment comes when I just know I’ve had enough. It’s not that I’ve stopped enjoying it. I’m not bored, I don’t even think it’s too long. I just have no desire to go on enjoying it. Can I say then that I’ve read it? Can I recommend it to others and speak of it as a fine book?
…To put a novel down before the end, then, is simply to acknowledge that for me its shape, its aesthetic quality, is in the weave of the plot and, with the best novels, in the meshing of the writing style with that weave. Style and plot, overall vision and local detail, fascinate together, in a perfect tangle. Once the structure has been set up and the narrative ball is rolling, the need for an end is just an unfortunate burden, an embarrassment, a deplorable closure of so much possibility. Sometimes I have experienced the fifty pages of suspense that so many writers feel condemned to close with as a stretch of psychological torture, obliging me to think of life as a machine for manufacturing pathos and tragedy, since the only endings we half-way believe in, of course, are the unhappy ones.
I wonder if, when a bard was recounting a myth, after some early Athenian dinner party perhaps, or round some campfire on the Norwegian coast, there didn’t come a point when listeners would vote to decide which ending they wanted to hear, or simply opt for an early bed. And I remember that Alan Ayckbourn has written plays with different endings, in which the cast decides, act by act, which version they will follow.
I also wonder if, in showing a willingness not to pursue even an excellent book to the death, a reader isn’t actually doing the writer a favor, exonerating him or her, from the near impossible task of getting out of the plot gracefully. There is a tyranny about our thrall to endings. I don’t doubt I would have a lower opinion of many of the novels I haven’t finished if I had.
[Photo Credit: Book Mania!]
Baseball is in the air…
