Nova’s turn as the Yanks play this afternoon in Detroit.
Brett Gardner CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Kevin Youkilis 3B
Travis Hafner DH
Brennan Boesch RF
Eduardo Nunez SS
Ichiro Suzuki LF
Lyle Overbay 1B
Chris Stewart C
Never mind those lousy memories from last October:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
Stan Isaacs, the acerbic, funny, and bright newspaper columnist, died on Tuesday. He was 83.
Over at ESPN, Bryan Curtis has a wonderful tribute. It’s a must-read (and while you are at it, check out Bryan’s story on the Chipmunks).
Here is an archive (you’ll need to scroll down) of pieces that Isaacs wrote on-line at The Columnists; here is a story he wrote on Mike Burke for Jock.
I met Stan at a session of The New York (baseball) Giants Nostalgia Society in the Bronx close to ten years ago. We exchanged e-mails periodically and he was terse and amusing. I’m proud to offer you, with Stan’s permission, two columns that he wrote in the 1960s. It will give you a small taste of his fine work.
In the meantime, our thoughts go to his family, friends, and colleagues. May he rest in peace.
“Marvelous Marv”
By Stan Isaacs
(Newsday, 1962)
That’s a love affair flowering between the Met fans and Marv Throneberry. It’s not quite apparent right now because Throneberry is the only Met player the fans at the Polo Grounds boo regularly. The perceptive mind, however, can read beyond mere outward appearances. Just as love and hate are the opposite sides of the same coin, so is this passion for Throneberry building up among Met rooters. At the rate he was booed on the last home stand, he may turn out to be one of the most popular athletes New York ever had.
Right now, the love affair is in the stage where the lovers snap at each other. They already suspect they might be liking each other and that intensifies the bickering—until the whole thing flowers into true love. I have already moved to be one of the first on the bandwagon by forming a press box chapter of the “I Love Marv Throneberry Club.” I am not disturbed that only one other has agreed to join—as membership secretary, because there would be no work. I can see other potential members whose expressions of exasperation with Marv’s work indicate that they are potentially fervent club members.
A prime recruit would be the reporter who used the name, “Marvelous Marv,” by which Throneberry is known in the press box, as a form of scorn throughout a story about a game in which Throneberry figured prominently: Marv forgot to touch third base on a triple and he made a costly interference error.
Met clubhouse man Herb Norman took that as a cue and substituted the sobriquet, “Marvelous Marv,” for “Throneberry” on the namecard above Throneberry’s locker. “Other players might not go for that,” Norman said. “But I can do it with Marv, because he has a good sense of humor.”
Marv appreciated the gag. He even pointed the sign out to the man who wrote the story and told him before a doubleheader: “Hey, I’ve got good news for you—I’m playing in only one of the games today.”
Marv is too big a man to be upset by bad writeups. “You once wrote something bad about me,” he said to the president of his fan club, “but I never said anything, did I?” He didn’t. The piece, which the president is sorry for because it kicked a man when he was down, knocked Throneberry for his seeming lack of spirited movement.
It is that lack of outward hustle and bustle that makes Throneberry a target for boos. Of course, his fielding and hitting failures have helped, but other Mets err and hit badly without becoming such a target. “These are my natural movements,” Throneberry said. “If I were to start dashing about like little Elio Chacon just to look as if I were hustling, it would be phony.”
Marv says, “They’re not going to run me out of New York the way they did Norm Siebern.” He points out that Mickey Mantle used to be booed. He is also able to comfort himself that some of the boos are directed at him because he plays instead of the No. 1 Met love, Gil Hodges.
The other day he even twitted Casey Stengel for going out to the mound to take out pitchers. “Every time you go out there, they start booing you. Are you trying to take away my fans?” Marv promises that one of these days, when the time is right, “I’m going to surprise them; I’m going to doff my cap to them in a big way, the way Stengel does.”
If he does it at the right time, he should wow them. There have been some hints already of what will happen when the love affair does turn into the mad thing it is destined to be. The other day Throneberry ran a long way for a foul pop, then caught it with a deft stab just as he almost hit the field boxes. An ovation followed, and it seemed then that the time was ripe for Marv. All he had to do was make another good play or two, hit a few homers, and he would have them eating out of his glove.
Alas, he missed that chance. Shortly afterward, he not only fumbled a grounder, but then, as the pitcher came to take his toss, he threw an underhanded lob that went over the pitcher’s head. “Gene Conley (a six-foot, eight-inch pitcher) would have had it,” was the remark of one potential member of the fan club. This was the same chap who refused to admit that Marv made a good play on the foul pop-up, saying he had overrun the ball. Which just goes to show how much this bloke is going to love Throneberry when the time comes.
People react negatively to Marv because they regard him as the prototype of the “losing ballplayer.” Marv has been with the Yankees, Athletics, and Orioles so far and hasn’t realized his slugging potential. Aware of the rap against him, Mary says: “So far I have never had a real chance. Wherever I have been, I have played behind an established first baseman. I feel that this is the first time I’m getting a full chance.
“I think I wasn’t nearly ready to play when I first came to the Mets. I had not played in so long, I was defensive at the plate and not sharp in the field. I’m beginning to feel like an offensive hitter now. And I think my fielding will get better as I play more.”
Those of us whose eyes are ready to see the glory of the coming of Marv Throneberry are aware that the marriage of Marvelous Marv and the Met fans was made a long time ago; the initials of Marvin Eugene Throneberry read M-E-T.
“He Made The Mets Fun”
By Stan Isaacs
(Newsday, 1965)
The time of Casey Stengel as manager of the Mets has come to an end. While it lasted, wasn’t that a time? Wasn’t that a wonderful time?
By his own lights, Casey Stengel failed as manager of the Mets. He had hoped to build a young, promising team, leaving a legacy that would soon be translated into stirring deeds on the ball field. He left no such team. At best there are half-a-dozen shining prizes of the youth of America on the team, and greatness is nowhere in sight.
But Stengel, of course, didn’t fail. He brought the greatness of his own spirit to the Mets. He made them something bigger than the ordinary story of the won-lost standings. He made the Mets fun—a slice of the humor of American life.
Stengel, as a baseball figure, has been bigger than life, a man larger than the arena in which he operated. There are only a few people in this world who attain that stature. They say of people like this that they walk with kings. Stengel could walk with kings and give them a wink along the way.
When Winston Churchill died, somebody commented that one of the outstanding things about the man was that he spanned so many eras. Churchill was a dynamic figure in the Boer War at the turn of the century and still right in the thick of things during the post-World War II era. In baseball terms, Stengel was that kind of figure, a man whose phenomenal memory enabled him to talk with the same glibness about the old Washington Park in Brooklyn as he did about new fashions in the cut of baseball uniforms.
In the time that Casey Stengel has been managing baseball teams there have been seven Presidents of the United States. In the time since he broke into baseball in 1910, there have been 10 Presidents.
It was possible to shoot almost any topic at Stengel and be confident he would relate some experience to it. When there was a Maine Day celebration at Shea Stadium for Met pitcher Carl Willey, a Maine native, Stengel reached into his background for entertaining stories about Maine that nobody had ever heard him tell before. He cited a ball player named Chief Sockalexis as a Maine native, and sure enough, everything Stengel said about him was true. He so often astounded people with his recollections it was perhaps inevitable that he would adopt the phrase “You could look it up.”
Casey Stengei is too big for any one essay. There is a need here, though, to say that to be around him has been to bask in him, to experience an exaltation of the spirit. The feeling of joy captured in the last scene of the movie Zorba the Greek—when Anthony Quinn leads the young poet in a dance of exultation on the beach—is the kind of ecstatic warmth generated by Stengel at his best.
I would daresay that if somebody set out to make a good movie about Casey Stengel, Anthony Quinn would be a wonderful person to play this craggy-faced minstrel of joy and unflagging hope. At first, it might seem an unlikely casting, but perhaps not if you chew on it for a moment.
Stengel’s departure at the hotel press conference yesterday was sad. The old man came into the room limping on his cane, nervous and misty-eyed. He brightened later when he could talk about the team and when he could answer questions with a touch of his old finger-pumping belligerence. But it still wasn’t vintage Stengel.
His last press conference as a Yankee, when they fired him, was better. He went out kicking and screaming that day, and you had fair reason to believe he would return someday, if you were inclined to want to reason that way.
When somebody asked him yesterday to select which of his tenures in New York he enjoyed the most (he played for the New York Giants, and managed the Brooklyns, Yankees and Mets) it seemed as if he would have liked to cite the Mets, but couldn’t because he didn’t succeed at what he set out to do with them. “Well, you’d have to say,” he started out, then switched his thought in midsentence by adding, “You couldn’t feel good if you are losing.”
He would rather be remembered for his success as manager of the Yankees, when he won 10 pennants in 12 years and astounded baseball people with his unorthodox moves. Of course, he had the material then—his years with the Mets showed he couldn’t do anything without the material—but he nevertheless made revolutionary moves with the Yanks that influenced the new generation of managers.
Age showed on the thinking of the Connie Macks and Jimmy Dykes and Charley Dressens; Stengel commanded respect of his peers to the end. “He still can beat you from the dugout,” a young lion like Gene Mauch would say.
A comic definition of the difference between a master and a grand master in chess captures for me the Stengel managerial genius.
“A master,” said chessman Arthur Bisguier, “cogitates carefully, perhaps a half-hour, on a move. Finally, he chooses the correct square for the correct piece and places it there. A grand master is much more skillful. He hardly thinks at all. He throws the piece into the air and it just falls on the right square.”
Goodness.
Guest Post
Our pal Pete Richmond remembers Roger Ebert:
Unlike many of my social-media colleagues who were lucky enough to meet Roger Ebert, I never did. I only knew him a while back as a guy on a TV show, with another guy in the other chair, presuming to tell me whether a movie was good or not. He and Gene Siskel’s relationship had a comforting vibe, but I, a bristly pseudo-artist-critic from the City of New York, home of the Yankees uptown and birthplace of Damn Yankees downtown, with Woody’s Manhattan somewhere in between, I always felt as if I were being ever-so-slightly lectured by an ever-so-slightly professor about a subject far too subjective to be bandied about by a couple of Midwestern white guys. (On top of which, the thumbs-up, thumbs-down thing creeped me out: flashes of the emperor in his Coliseum luxury box deciding the fate of a gladiator, on a whim.)
Truth is, I never decided whether to go to a movie because of what Roger Ebert said about it. What could a guy for the plodding Trib know about the essence of a film, its nuance, its art? Real movies only aimed to capture the hearts and minds of we sophisticates on the East Coast (the Philistines who made them out in Lemming Angeles? As if.) But Carl Sandburg’s big-shouldered meatpacking town telling me whether Terrence Malick and David Lynch were frauds or geniuses? Please. Canby! Kael! Real salon-sambuca-sipping Critics! The Second City could teach me a lot about architecture…but movies?
Then I grew older, and the world grew snarkier, and Siskel died, which was sad-making, but still, if their pairing had made for such immortal TV, why go on with the show with a replacement? Roger and the other guy lost me for good.
And then, in 2010, a few years ago, apparently long out of the loop, I read about Ebert’s health. About how thyroid cancer had left him with no jaw, and after three reconstructive surgeries had failed, leaving him looking grotesque, he refused to try any more, because, in his own words, “This is what I look like.” He said he thought that as a culture we are very bad at dealing with sickness, and, in one fell swoop, he did a whole lot to change that.
And then I read that he was a master chef, even though he could not taste – indeed, took nutrition through a tube. And that while he couldn’t talk, he had a text-to-message program that allowed him to give interviews. And I started paying more attention to his movie reviews, He saw 306 movies last year.
And no, he wasn’t the best movie critic out there, not by any means. He was not Anthony Lane (although he was better than Denby, if I have to flash my prejudices.) But he wasn’t mean. He wasn’t attitudinal. He never let his ego get in the way of his criticism.
And when he announced yesterday that he was taking a Leave of Presence, because cancer had reappeared, but he announced about 11 different other things that he was going to be backing, I thought: Man, you did it. Ill, you’ve aged gracefully. Here comes a third act that the rest of us will admire, and enjoy: Selfless Roger Ebert projects all over the place: an arsenal of artistic sanity in a world gone angry.
Then he died. And I instantly knew what was up with that prolific message that had offered 24 hours earlier so much hope for the future: He was subtextually telling us: “This is the possibility of the future of what I have envisioned, but won’t see. A day or so from now, I’ll be gone. I hope you guys will take some of the good I hoped to create, express and exemplify, carry on.” Unlike any other writer (except for Updike), he didn’t even hint that he was on his way out. No one has ever died with more grace. We owe him this: to look at the insane good fortune with which we’ve been blessed, and to go to the movies.
The Yankees won their first game of the 2013 season like they have won so many others – with Andy Pettitte throwing the first pitch and Mariano Rivera throwing the last. As contemplating the starting lineup remains a daily dose of disappointment, Andy and Mo served much-needed notice to all us sad-sack fans – there is still something very special about rooting for the Yankees.
After CC Sabathia and Hiroki Kuroda issued the Red Sox seven free bases in 6.3 innings, Andy Pettitte reminded us of the benefits of staying in and around the strike zone. He walked only one in eight strong innings and avoided trouble almost all night long. Three ground balls with men on base turned into three double plays. On the third double play, the key play to getting Andy through the eighth, an audible “hoot” leapt from my couch. I was surprised to learn it came from my throat.
Brett Gardner and Francisco Cervelli hit solo homers to give the Yankees a little breathing room in the ninth and set the stage for Mariano’s return to the mound for the first time since his knee injury last May. Mariano’s cutter broke sharply throughout his outing and, as David Cone noted, looks more and more like a suped-up slider every year.
He battled Dustin Pedroia but lost him to a walk when the umpire didn’t bite on a 2-2 pitch just off the corner. It was a ball, but it’s a call Mariano gets nearly every time. Jonny Gomes yoinked a double just over the third base bag which set up Pedroia to score on the second out of the inning. Even though the tying run was up in the form of very impressive rookie Jackie Bradley, there was no need to fret. Mariano gave the lefty-hitting rook a time-capsule experience.
The first pitch was the show-me cutter, hard and low but over the plate for a called strike. The second pitch started on the inner half and rode so far in on Bradley’s hands he could do nothing but foul it off his own chest. And on the third pitch Mariano pegged a blue dart at the outside corner which might as well been a mile away to poor Bradley. It was a ball, but the umpire finally caught on to what was happening and rung him up. Yanks 4, Sox 2.
It was the 69th time Mo saved one of Andy’s wins. But as familiar as it was, it’s also the new blueprint they’re going to have to follow to win while the lineup features the understudies. Starting pitcher keeps it close. A few timely hits and good defense. Bullpen holds the line.
There ‘s no shame about not being geeked up for this season given the injuries and the looming payroll decisions. I’ve haven’t been less personally invested in the Yankees since 1982, but I’m sure glad I watched this one.
More from our man Dexter. This one originally ran in the Philly Daily News on October 11, 1984. It appears here with the author’s permission.
“There’s Something About Steve”
By Pete Dexter
I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think my wife has a serious case for Steve Garvey. I know that must be embarrassing to hear, it’s certainly embarrassing to admit. I would personally rather come home and find her with egrets. I can’t say if it’s the boyish good looks that got to her, or the refreshing modesty or the way he wears his pants like his mother dressed him for school, but something is going on.
The first time I noticed it, the Dodgers were in the World Series. Steve played for them before he signed on with San Diego, and they beat the Yankees. My wife was a Yankees fan then – she will be again when George Steinbrenner buys enough people to win – and she listened to Garvey giving a post-game interview, refusing to take credit for a victory that had taken 25 guys pulling together to achieve. Yes, he talks like that.
She said, “That is the most disgusting human being I have ever seen. ” And I knew right there something was up. Word for word, that was what she used to say about me.
That, of course, was before we got married. A little of the magic has to leave after seven years, right?
Anyway, I thought it would pass. After all, her kidney stones did. And in fact after the series, we came to an unspoken understanding that the words Steve and Garvey were never to be heard, one after another, under our roof.
We didn’t use the expression first sacker, we even stayed away from the number six. We certainly never mentioned the Dodgers, even after Steve went to San Diego. But there are some things you can forgive and forget, and some things you can’t. And every time I wanted to say “first sacker” but stopped myself short, it hurt in a way I knew would never completely heal.
And it never did, because the old feelings came back the second I walked into the house last week and heard that Steve Garvey had just driven in five runs to tie the playoff series with the Cubs at two games each. He was being congratulated on television.
Steve smiled, a nice controlled smile, and said, “It was my pleasure. ” Then he said he couldn’t take credit for a victory that had taken 25 guys pulling together to achieve.
“He makes my skin crawl,” my wife said.
I stood in the door, stunned. “I thought I made your skin crawl,” I said, when I’d gotten myself together.
“Oh,” she said, “you do it better . . .”
Sure.
The night after that, the Padres came from three runs down to beat the Cubs and move into the World Series. Steve Garvey did not knock in five runs, but when I came in the door they were congratulating him anyway.
His teammates were pouring champagne over his head, and he had a controlled, good-natured smile on his face, and was waiting patiently for the microphone so he could say it takes all 25 people on a ball club to win.
“Have you ever seen him when he walks?” my wife said.
“He limps?” I said.
“No, when he walks at bat.”
“You mean he doesn’t always hit a home run?” I said. Ha. Stuck her a good one there, right?
She shook her head. She said, “Anybody else, they toss the bat in the dirt and run to first base. Steve Garvey hands it to the bat boy. He looks him in the eye. And when he gets to first base, he always says something to the first baseman that makes them both smile.
“Sometimes,” she said, “he makes the umpire smile too. ”
“So?”
“The smiles,” she said, “they last exactly four seconds.”
“What are you trying to tell me?” I said.
She said it was just that she couldn’t stand him. She said he probably had hair all over his back. She is supposed to hate that, but try pulling her out of the Great Apes exhibit at the zoo some time. She said the hair on his head was never out of place, not even sliding into home with the winning run.
“When he comes out of the dugout and tips his cap to the standing ovation,” she said, “he doesn’t put it back on, he fits it.”
She saw then that I was hurt, and tried to make it up to me. “You left a Coke in the freezer again last night,” she said. “It blew up and there’s little pieces of glass everywhere.” But there was no passion in it.
I smiled in a polite way. Not as polite as Steve Garvey would have smiled – Steve, of course, would have bought a new refrigerator and given the old one to orphans – but as polite as I can be when I see my wife complaining about another man.
I sat down at the table and fed a quarter of a pound of butter to the dog. I burped. The dog burped. I spilled spaghetti in my lap. She fussed, but there was no passion.
It is just something I’ll have to wait out.
On national television, Garvey was giving the credit to his teammates. ”Aulk,” she said. “Aulk.” That is a noise to simulate throwing up.
Our noise.
And in my worst nightmares, it never occurred to me that she could make it for somebody who is nothing like me at all.
Catwoman by Adam Hughes.
You know that weird feeling you get when you watch a movie and there’s a bunch of actors playing the big bad New York Yankees? That’s sort of what I experienced last night watching these new faces in the home pinstripes. And–get this–for all my talk of how I wouldn’t miss Nick Swisher, I found myself missing Nick Swisher. Certainly Derek Jeter. I mean: Who are these guys?
Welp, these guys, this team, are a work in progress, and that’s being nice about it. Hiroki Kuroda was hit in the hand trying to field a ball, left the game early, and the Sox cruised to a 7-4 win. Travis Hafner hit a solo home run and in the eighth inning, Vernon Wells hit a line drive into the seats in left field, good for a three-run homer. It sounded great, a clear, sharp crack. The only other memorable part of the game came when the Yankee catcher Chris Stewart caught a pop up next to the Red Sox dugout. After he made the catch, he began to fall into the dugout and three players, including Dustin Pedroia instinctively moved to catch him. Stewart didn’t acknowledge their gesture but didn’t need to. I’m sure he appreciated the professional courtesy.
Otherwise, it was a lousy night for the Bombers. But ol’ reliable Andy Pettitte goes tonight so there’s always that.
[Photo Credit: Mark Steinmetz]
Our man Hiroki.
Brett Gardner, CF
Ichiro Suzuki, RF
Robinson Cano, 2B
Kevin Youkilis, 3B
Travis Hafner, DH
Vernon Wells, LF
Lyle Overbay, 1B
Eduardo Nunez, SS
Chris Stewart, C
Never mind Opening Day: Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Photo Credit: N.Y. Daily News]
Jim Dwyer on Mike McAlary and the final work by Nora Ephron, “Lucky Guy”:
If memory serves, sometime around March 1999 a caller to The Daily News introduced herself as Nora Ephron, and how about dinner?
She was thinking that the life and death of Mike McAlary would make a film. Ephron told me that she couldn’t remember ever meeting him, but that she had read the obituaries a few months earlier, after his death at 41 on Christmas Day 1998. Seen from a distance, the contrails of his life were the stuff of myths.
Fueled by high-octane swagger, McAlary had been a star columnist at the city tabloids for a decade, specializing in police corruption and police heroics. Near the end he fell spectacularly on his face and was written off, prematurely and in some circles, gleefully, as a sloppy, self-aggrandizing hack. Terminally ill, he bolted his own chemotherapy session one summer morning to sneak into the hospital room of Abner Louima, who had been grotesquely tortured with a plunger by police officers. A few months before he died, McAlary was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the columns that made the case a national scandal.
What Ephron needed from me, and others, were not bold-type headlines, but brush strokes. There were things I couldn’t be much help on. McAlary and I were not bar buddies — he was a night life Olympian — and for most of the decade, we worked at different papers. But we were the same age, both writing columns three times a week and we spoke almost every day to help each other feed the column furnace, swapping names, phone numbers, angles.
He began practically every conversation not with hello, but by announcing, “This is good for us.”
[Image Via: Iconoclast]
From Kottke, here is a link to Lester Bang’s obit for Elvis:
It was the autumn of 1971, and two tickets to an Elvis show turned up at the offices of Creem magazine, where I was then employed. It was decided that those staff members who had never had the privilege of witnessing Elvis should get the tickets, which was how me and art director Charlie Auringer ended up in nearly the front row of the biggest arena in Detroit. Earlier Charlie had said, “Do you realize how much we could get if we sold these fucking things?” I didn’t, but how precious they were became totally clear the instant Elvis sauntered onto the stage. He was the only male performer I have ever seen to whom I responded sexually; it wasn’t real arousal, rather an erection of the heart, when I looked at him I went mad with desire and envy and worship and self-projection. I mean, Mick Jagger, whom I saw as far back as 1964 and twice in ’65, never even came close.
There was Elvis, dressed up in this ridiculous white suit which looked like some studded Arthurian castle, and he was too fat, and the buckle on his belt was as big as your head except that your head is not made of solid gold, and any lesser man would have been the spittin’ image of a Neil Diamond damfool in such a getup, but on Elvis it fit. What didn’t? No matter how lousy his records ever got, no matter how intently he pursued mediocrity, there was still some hint, some flash left over from the days when…well, I wasn’t there, so I won’t presume to comment. But I will say this: Elvis Presley was the man who brought overt blatant vulgar sexual frenzy to the popular arts in America (and thereby to the nation itself, since putting “popular arts” and “America” in the same sentence seems almost redundant). It has been said that he was the first white to sing like a black person, which is untrue in terms of hard facts but totally true in terms of cultural impact. But what’s more crucial is that when Elvis started wiggling his hips and Ed Sullivan refused to show it, the entire country went into a paroxysm of sexual frustration leading to abiding discontent which culminated in the explosion of psychedelic-militant folklore which was the sixties.
I mean, don’t tell me about Lenny Bruce, man – Lenny Bruce said dirty words in public and obtained a kind of consensual martyrdom. Plus which Lenny Bruce was hip, too goddam hip if you ask me, which was his undoing, whereas Elvis was not hip at all, Elvis was a goddam truck driver who worshipped his mother and would never say shit or fuck around her, and Elvis alerted America to the fact that it had a groin with imperatives that had been stifled. Lenny Bruce demonstrated how far you could push a society as repressed as ours and how much you could get away with, but Elvis kicked “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” out the window and replaced it with “Let’s fuck.” The rest of us are still reeling from the impact. Sexual chaos reigns currently, but out of chaos may flow true understanding and harmony, and either way Elvis almost singlehandedly opened the floodgates. That night in Detroit, a night I will never forget, he had but to ever so slightly move one shoulder muscle, not even a shrug, and the girls in the gallery hit by its ray screamed, fainted, howled in heat. Literally, every time this man moved any part of his body the slightest centimeter, tens or tens of thousands of people went berserk. Not Sinatra, not Jagger, not the Beatles, nobody you can come up with ever elicited such hysteria among so many. And this after a decade and a half of crappy records, of making a point of not trying.
