Alexandra’s big apple pancake. Drool.
Wednesday
January 8, 2025
Since 2002
Monthly Archives: February 2013
New York Minute
I was standing on the uptown platform of the 7th Avenue line at 42nd street last night with a friend when we heard a young woman’s voice. It was clear and also annoyed. She was climbing up the stairs from the 7 train. “We’ve been in New York for a couple of hours and we’ve already walked five miles.” She was holding a McDonald’s cup and she stomped up the steps, looking ready for a fight.
Not everyone from New York enjoys walking. But it sounded so strange to hear someone bitching about it. I just take it for granted that this is a place for walkers. Then again, when my sister and I were little we complained about having to walk all the way from 103rd Street to 96th to McDonalds. Our babysitter used to make fun of us. But we were four-years-old, so I’ll give us a pass.
Coming Soon
Always waiting for the smell. That combination of dirt and warmth that signals not just the coming of spring but more distinctly: baseball. I caught a trace of something related this morning–closer, it’s getting there–but it wasn’t it. Still, it was a reminder and sometimes that’s enough.
Meanwhile, check out this picture of two kids playing one-on-one a few weeks ago at the famous West 4th Street court. Hey man, when you’ve got to play, you’ve got to play, right?
It Ain’t Easy
I doubt this comes as a shock, but not everyone works hard in the minors. Not everyone is willing to wipe out a second baseman, or change positions or do early work in the cage. And some of those guys who don’t work nearly as hard have enough natural ability to win opportunities that other guys can only dream about.
“I never really looked at it like that, and I especially don’t look at it like that now,” Duncan said. “For all the guys you see that make it and you think, ‘Man, if that guy made it definitely could have made it or should have made it.’ For every one of those, I played against two other guys that you’re like, ‘If this guy’s not making it, I’m never going to make it.’ Do you remember (eventual Cubs big leaguer) Bobby Scales? I remember playing against that guy in Pawtucket and he was just so good. Power and speed and he could play every position on the field, and then you talk to the guy and he’s like the nicest guy ever. That was one of the guys. It was like, if this guy can’t make it, Jesus, what am I going to do?”
Not surprisingly, Duncan’s long-time teammate Shelley Duncan put things a little more colorfully.
“You see a lot of prima donna players make it to the big leagues because they don’t play with that same intensity so it doesn’t beat up their body, but that’s not Eric’s character,” Shelley said. “… There’s as lot of horse**** players in the big leagues too, that people look at as really good, but the truth is they’re horse**** players, and there’s a lot of players in the minor leagues that are better than them.”
[Photo Credit: Derick E. Hingle/USA Today, via It’s a Long Season]
New York Minute
Always nice, with the potential for some magic, when Manhattan slows down during a snow storm. Course today it’s raining and the snow is all but a memory here in midtown.
[Photo Credit: Eye Heart New York]
The Banter Gold Standard: Broadway Sportsman
Here’s a 1958 gem by the great Jimmy Cannon (from The World of Jimmy Cannon).
“Broadway Sportsman”
By Jimmy Cannon
The Broadway sportsman lives in Brooklyn with his widowed mother who would starve if she didn’t get Social Security. He generally eats dinner at home, but takes his coffee in the chophouses where the gamblers congregate. His idea of a celebrity is any man who can afford to wear silk shirts. He wears ready-made suits, but tears out the label to give the impression they’re tailor-made. Just once he would like a man to ask him who his tailor is.
He would consider it an honor if a man publicly accused him of stealing his wife. He spends a lot of time in Hanson’s drugstore and suggests to the press agents who hang out there that they tie him up with one of their clients. He has never had his name mentioned in a Broadway column but he refers to columnists by their first names in conversation. He occasionally takes out a hostess in a dance hall, but describes her as a showgirl to his kind. They know he is lying, but he puts up with their lies too, and they never call him.
The Broadway sportsman thinks of himself as a gambler. He knows the price on all sporting-events, but be is terrified when it comes to risking money He goes to the trotters and the flats by himself when he gets a pass from an office boy on a newspaper who is also a Broadway Sportsman, but he never bets more than a deuce to show. He usually loses that, too, because be bets on long shots, figuring they must run third. He has never learned to read a racing form and is too embarrassed to ask anyone to teach him.
He is one of the last of the sidewalk-loafers. You can find him outside of Shor’s, Reuben’s, Lindy’s, Moore’s and Gallagher’s. He is well-liked by the doormen because he kills time with them by discussing sports. He believes Leo Durocher is a hell of a manager and considers George Raft the greatest actor that ever lived. He tries to dress like them.
He reads Variety and talks that periodical’s language. He calls press agents flacks and show business is always show biz. He worked briefly in the office of a small-time theatrical agent who handled stripteasers. He was fired when he took one of the clients out and used so much profanity, she slapped his face. He figured that was the way to talk to a burlesque dame. His mother has a political connection and every Christmas he works in the post office.
The Broadway sportsman is a panhandler. He lives by touches. His victims are the lonely. He stands for hours nursing a beer; at the bars of sporting restaurants. Guys who drink in solitude find him a glad companion. He switches to bourbon when someone else buys. He has been around so long his face is familiar and he is an eager conversationalist with a cruel style of humor. His vicious comedy is founded on the insincerity of women. He gives the impression he has been betrayed in love. His mother is the only woman who ever loved him.
In his time the Broadway sportsman has eaten well in the best restaurants and sat in the best seats at theatrical openings, ballgames, fights and nightclubs. He makes his big touches when his benefactors go to the racetrack. He runs their bets, flatters them when they win and consoles them when they lose. If they have a winning day, it is a Broadway custom to stake the stooge. He wishes he had the courage to be a tout but his ignorance of horse racing is appalling. But when he is with his own species, he insinuates that he is a hustler who bleeds marks with horse information.
Waiters hate him. He is entitled to claim the Olympic record for being Mickey Finned. He abuses them if they are slovenly or slow. He also advises his hosts how much they should tip and adds up the tab in strange joints before he allows his master to pay it. He calls a waiter by snapping his fingers. Several waiters have accused him of stealing tips. He has never been caught at it.
He pretends to root for the ball team the guy who takes him to the game likes. The Broadway sportsman was a Brooklyn fan when Durocher managed the Dodgers and switched to the Giants with him, but he has bawled insults at his idol from a box seat to agree with his benefactors. He is a pest at ballgames. He umpires calling balls and strikes before the umpire. At a race track he spits at jockeys and calls them obscene names when they lose a bet for his man. He is the first guy in a fight audience to denounce a beaten pug as yellow. At a basketball game he yells dump every time a college kid misses a shot.
The Broadway sportsman probably knows more showgirls than anyone outside of show business. They continually turn him down for dates. He promises them he will manage them to stardom. He is so obvious in his pitch that even kids in their first show are amused by him. He often rides shotgun for a married benefactor who does a little cheating. He’s the third man in the party and pretends he’s the mouse’s escort. He loses benefactors because the girls can’t stand him.
The Broadway sportsman has damaged the reputations of people he has never met. At the tables where be mooches he hears gossip which he gives to the press agents in the drugstore. Some of it reaches the Broadway columns. He passes along a rumor as absolute truth. His biggest thrill came when be read an item be distributed which told of the divorce of a Hollywood couple. His next came when be was introduced to George Raft.
[Photographs by Walker Evans; featured image by Saul Leiter]
Operation: Doomsday
The Yanks are going to be horrible this season, haven’t you heard? Over at Hardball Talk, Craig Calcaterra’s got a new series for the decline of the Yanks: Doom Watch. Just in time as we wait for pitchers and catchers to report.
Our Men in Mexico
Our pals Eric Nusbaum and Craig Robinson were on hand for the Caribbean Series championship in Mexico. They’ve got a five-part series over at Sports on Earth.
Don’t miss it.
Morning Art
“Waiting” By Royko Tajiri.
New York Minute
Snow! Holy Cow, gettothestoregetfoodhurryhurry. Do you think we’ll make it?
Eh, it’s iffy. In the meantime, I saw this picture over at the always great site, Kottke. Like the shot, especially because it was taken in father’s old neighborhood.
Morning Art
Saul Leiter: snow shots.
“Canopy” (1957)
“Snow” (1960)
“Red Umbrella” (1958)
“Postmen” (1952)
Inspiration, as always, from This Isn’t Happiness.
Beat of the Day
Always loved this one.
Tru Master
Rest in Peace, Donald Byrd.
Life Coach
The acclaimed author Neal Gabler has a long piece on coach Larry Brown today over at Grantland:
At the age of 72, with the Naismith Hall of Fame on his résumé and his standing as the only basketball coach ever to have won both an NCAA championship and an NBA championship, you have to wonder why Larry Brown is riding the team bus nearly four hours down I-35 through Waco, Georgetown (not that Georgetown), Round Rock, and Austin to San Marcos and Texas State University; why at six one morning, he drives his Chevy Malibu to a Houston high school to scout a kid while Coach K flies in on his private jet; why last July alone he hauled himself around the country to Philly, Indiana, Las Vegas, Orlando, two outposts in the Texas hinterlands, and Hampton, Virginia, where John Calipari of Kentucky and Bill Self of Kansas, two of Brown’s closest friends, sat seigneurially in the stands focusing on three or four prime recruits; why he spends his afternoons on the practice floor teaching basketball to hardworking young men who are not and will never be among the basketball elite and who, Brown jokes, have to Google him to find out who he is; why he tolerates games in half-empty arenas where the cheerleaders are louder than the crowd and where he can’t help but pop up off the bench during nearly every possession, gesticulating at his players like a ground crewman directing a plane to the gate, and why he risks suffering the losses even though his veins bulge, his face reddens, and he has been known to break out in a rash during a game; above all, why he has left his family back in Philadelphia — his beautiful young wife and his teenage son and daughter, whom he adores — to live in a residential hotel in Dallas, where he eats takeout food and spends most nights alone.
“He doesn’t need this,” admits his assistant coach, Tim Jankovich. “He could be drawing a 4-iron around a tree.”
So why is Larry Brown subjecting himself to this?
Check it out.
[Photo Credit: AP]
"This ain't football. We do this every day."
--Earl Weaver
--Earl Weaver